All Souls
by aghast
Summary: Afterlife Alison gets involved when Robert's boss, Barbara, has an encounter with the spirit world.
1. Chapter 1

Note: Edited to reflect new information. Now contains spoilers all the way through the end of series 2, episode 8.

_Thursday, 2 November 2007_

The gate squeaked as Barbara pushed it open. It always did. She'd been coming here for thirty years, and no one, in all that time, had bothered to oil those hinges. Maybe the staff thought it added atmosphere to have a creaky gate in a graveyard. Who knew?

It was Paul she came to see, Paul, her adored eldest brother, who had been killed in a motorbike accident when he was at university and she was in secondary school. She didn't visit his grave as often as she used to, but she still came two or three times a year, and always for his birthday in November. On summer visits, she brought pink roses from her own garden because they smelled the sweetest to her. Today her arms were full of the other kind of roses: out-of-season blooms that had been grown in a hothouse and kept fresh in water at the flower shop. They'd do, though. Honestly, she wasn't sure anymore whether Paul had even cared for flowers. So much about him had been lost in the passage of time: all she really had left were a few photos and one or two of his things - and this place, of course. A grave was one thing you could always be certain of.

Barb made her way along old paths laid with worn, mossy stones that deadened her footsteps, and then crossed into the newer section of the graveyard, where the heels of her boots clicked crisply on poured concrete. At last she reached the right place, and brushed dead leaves away from the marker before laying the roses at its base. There was a bench just to the side, and she sat down on it with a little sigh to think about Paul. He would have been fifty tomorrow, perhaps a father with grown children, no doubt greying a bit - not the dark, handsome young man whom half her friends had been in love with. She'd hated the idea of growing old when she was that age, but the older she got, the more it seemed like a blessing to have the opportunity. There were too many who hadn't, too many like her brother. Like Robert.

A gust of wind came along just then, and shivering, she got up and slung her bag over her shoulder. It was always too cold to stay very long at this time of year, and anyway, she ought to get started on the road home before dark. She walked back along the rows, glancing at gravestones as she went: John Arnold Jones, 1954; Rupert B. Halliburton, 1939; Elsie Mae Strickland, 1921; Mary Katherine Blythe, 1897 - all unknown, but all familiar as names from her own family tree.

She was halfway back to the gate already, and coming up on her left was a grave she'd always wondered about. It stood off to one side, nearly hugging the wrought-iron fence, with just a small, roughly cut hump of stone to mark its head. In the summer it was a faint, slightly sunken outline in the grass, but now the leaves were piled up so thickly on it that there was hardly anything to be seen. It looked awfully lonely there in the cold November afternoon, off by itself with nothing else around it and that blanket of leaves lying undisturbed, as if even the caretaker didn't bother to look after it.

_God, that's sad_, she thought. Whoever was in there had surely been someone's brother or sister, someone's husband or wife, hadn't they? She'd hate for Paul to end up like that one day, or to end up like that herself, for that matter.

On impulse, she turned, walked back to Paul's grave and picked up one of the long-stemmed roses she'd left there. Paul wouldn't mind; of course he wouldn't. The brother who had taken his little sister out for ice-cream and let her borrow his records would never have begrudged a single flower to some poor, forgotten person in a graveyard. Carrying the rose in a gloved hand, she went past John Arnold and Rupert B. and Elsie Mae and Mary Katherine again, turned at the end of the row, and bent over to put the rose on the mystery grave.

"There you are," she said. Another gust of wind blew past, making the leaves swirl and settle, and she wrinkled up her nose; it smelt very peculiar in this area, like standing water and mould and decay. Maybe the ground had got wet underneath the leaves last time it rained.

"I've got to go now," she said to no one in particular. She wasn't sure why. There was a sort of expectancy in the air, as if someone were waiting for her to do or say something more, and how stupid was it to think that? She came to visit Paul and even talked to him sometimes, but it was really for her, not for him: he was gone, whoever was buried in this grave was gone, and there was no one within these walls who could hear her. Still, she blathered on: "It's getting late, and I've got work tomorrow, so I've got to hurry up and go."

Only the faint rustle of the leaves answered her. She sniffed; there was the smell again, vague but unpleasant.

Barb didn't think she wanted to find out what it was. She'd done her good deed for the day and it was time to leave. Without looking at the grave again, she hurried out through the squeaky gate and to her car.

By the time she got home, it was long past dark and beginning to rain. As usual on wet nights, there was no place to park anywhere near her house, but she did the best she could and walked quickly, with her head down and her hands stuffed in her coat pockets. As she pulled out her keys, she noticed a few rose petals clinging to the knitted cuff of her glove; they must have been hanging on since the graveyard, or else found their way into her pocket and got stuck on the glove when she reached in there. She shook them off onto the mat and unlocked her front door before any more rain could run down the back of her neck.

Inside, she tossed her keys and bag onto the little table she kept in the entrance hall, and started to hang up her coat as well, but then decided to leave it on for now; it was almost colder in here than it had been outside. She'd go see what was wrong with the heat in just a moment. As she passed the phone, she pressed the button to hear her messages: one from her mother, asking if she'd remembered Paul's birthday (yes), one from her friend Jane asking if she wanted to go for a drink tonight (not really), and one from an automated voice wanting to tell her that she might already have won a valuable prize (delete).

The heat must have been out all day, she thought as she walked into the front room. It was really beyond cold; she could have hung a side of beef from the hook in the ceiling that was meant to hold a lamp. Stripping off a glove, she knelt and held a hand near the radiator - and was astonished to feel warm air coming out of it. She pulled her hand back: cold. She stretched it out again: warm. The warmth was quite strong near the radiator, but it extended no further than two fingers' breadth above it. There was a clear line of demarcation, as if there were an invisible bubble beyond which heat could not go.

Barb paused there, with one glove off and one glove on, and frowned. This made no sense. Warm air rose, and as far as she knew, it kept rising as long as there was no physical barrier. It didn't rise and then stop for no reason. But it was doing that, and damned if the rest of the room wasn't getting colder every second. She huffed out a frustrated breath and realised that she could actually see it, a vague white cloud in front of her face. Her body was beginning to ache from being held rigid against the chill.

"What the hell?" she said in a near-whisper.

She stood up, and as she did, the smell from the graveyard suddenly assaulted her, forcing its way into her nostrils and down her throat like a sort of olfactory rape. For an instant, she told herself that it had clung to her clothes the way the rose petals had clung to her gloves, and she was only catching a lingering whiff of it now - but it was a hundred, a thousand times worse than it had been before. It was hideous, like wet earth and slimy rotten leaves and dead animals festering in hidden places, like a newly emptied grave yawning wide open to trap her inside.

Nearly choking, Barb clapped her still-gloved hand over her mouth and nose and breathed through it, hoping she wasn't going to get sick. The temperature plummeted again - a big, noticeable drop this time - and then came yet another sensation she couldn't explain. It was like the expectant waiting she'd felt in the graveyard, but stronger, the way the smell was stronger, and it carried with it a sense of watching, as if invisible eyes were fixed upon her. Dimly, she remembered Robert telling her long ago that he had felt a "negative energy" in a supposedly haunted place, and what had she said to him? Oh yes, that it was crap.

_That's right,_ she told herself. _Utter crap. Suggestibility. Hysteria. You've been at the graveyard; you've been thinking about Paul and Robert and people dying young; you're tired and not clear in the head ..._

_But that smell, God, that smell! And the cold!_

No, the cold was just cold; maybe she'd left a window open somewhere, and there had to be a reason the warm air from the radiator wasn't getting out into the room - a cross-current or something, like the jet stream. And the smell - the smell was all in her head. Wasn't it?

Experimentally, she took her hand away from her face, and then slapped it back again , gagging, as the horrible odour surged.

_It's nothing, a mouse died in the wall, that's all, you know how bad they can get, it's only a mouse and there is nothing, I said NOTHING odd about that!_

Well. Even if it was a mouse, she didn't have to stay here and smell it, did she? She could leave for a bit and come back later, couldn't she? Of course she could.

She wanted to run, but forced herself to walk quickly back through the room and to the front door, where she discovered to her amazement and dread that the door and its knob were covered with a thin, white sheet of ice. It crackled and broke when she touched it, but the knob wouldn't turn; something inside the lock itself had frozen.

_Oh please, oh please_ ... She rattled the knob harder, feeling real panic beginning to build. There was a back door, but to get to it she'd have to go through the entire ground floor, through the cold and the stench, and if she could get outside she would be in the back garden, penned up in the dark. The icy surface of the knob was making her ungloved hand ache, sending bolts of numbing pain all the way up to her elbow, and she couldn't feel her fingers any longer. The sensation of being watched was growing stronger every moment; it was nearly at an intolerable pitch now, and in desperation, she grasped the doorknob with both hands and yanked it so hard that the door burst inward, nearly knocking her over. In an instant, she was through the gap and stumbling down the front path, fat, freezing raindrops pelting her head and shoulders.

When she reached the pavement, she couldn't help herself any longer and ran, ran till her side started to hurt and she had to stop, leaning against a lamppost and gasping for breath. Far down the road, she could see a faint light that she thought must be spilling through her open front door. Dear God, had the thing inside left the same way she had? Had it followed her out into the night?

"There is no thing!" she told herself in a shrill, weepy-sounding voice. The moment she said it, she thought she smelled that horrible decaying odour again, just for an instant, and it was more than she could bear. She doubled over and was sick at the foot of some unknown neighbour's nicely trimmed hedge, choking and heaving until she was on the verge of blacking out. At last she managed to stop, and sat right down on the rain-soaked pavement while she pulled herself together. If the thing wanted her, it would have to come and get her. She couldn't move to save her life.

When she felt a bit better - "better," in this case, being a relative term that meant "not likely to vomit again just yet" - she started thinking about phoning someone for help. She couldn't remember what she'd done with her mobile and for a dreadful minute, was certain she had left it on the table with her keys. If so, it was going to stay there, because she wouldn't go back into the house alone if someone walked up and offered her the entire Premium Bonds jackpot to do it. But when she stuck her hand into her coat pocket, her fingers brushed the phone's familiar rounded case.

She fished it out, pressed Talk, and then stopped. Whom did you call in a situation like this? The police? The fire department? MI5?

_Ghostbusters_, she thought, and felt mad laughter bubble up in her chest. She squashed it down again and told herself not to be stupid. There really was only one person she _could_ phone, wasn't there? Only one person who would not tell her that she was altered and delusional and needed immediate hospitalisation and a course of drugs - not that she was entirely sure she didn't. Now that she was out of the house and away from ... whatever it had been, it was all too easy to tell herself that it hadn't been real, that she was developing some sort of late-onset schizophrenia, as if that would be preferable somehow.

She'd thought she was all right, but as soon as Alison said "Hello?" she lost all semblance of calm and started to cry in big, humiliating sobs. There was just no end to the indignities of this night. Chased out of her home by something she couldn't see and might have imagined, left sitting in the rain next to a puddle of sick like some sort of alcoholic tramp, and now bawling down the phone to a woman who most likely loathed her, unable even to explain what was wrong.

"Who is this?" Alison's voice was weary, but not surprised. Probably, Barb thought, hysterical nighttime phone calls were business as usual for her.

"It's Barbara S-Sinyard," she managed. "I worked with Robert -"

"Oh." Now Alison sounded perplexed and a little suspicious. "What's this all about, then?"

Barb felt her throat constrict with the threat of more tears, and put her hand over the phone for a moment, struggling for control.

"I, ah, I'm at home - well, not exactly - I'm up the road and, and, and I need to talk to you."

"All right, I'm listening, what do you want to talk about?"

"Not on the phone," said Barb. "In person. Can you come here?"

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then Alison said, "Not right away, if that's what you're asking. I don't drive and the bus takes ages. Can't this wait until morning?"

"No, I don't think it can," said Barb, looking back down the road at the light from her house. "What if you call a taxi? I'll pay for it - oh, God, I haven't got any money with me - I'll pay you back."

Alison sighed. "I suppose I could come round for a bit. Where do you live?"

Barb told her.

"Oh, very nice," said Alison dryly. "But you said you weren't at home, didn't you? You said you were up the road. What exactly does that mean? Are you at a neighbour's?"

"No, I'm outside, I don't know whose house. I'll walk down and meet you when you get here. Just come. Please."

"Fine. Twenty minutes, half an hour at the most," said Alison, and rang off, leaving Barb alone on the deserted street without even a voice for company. She supposed she'd deserved every drop of unfriendliness in Alison's demeanour; they hadn't spoken since the day Robert had died last year, and she hadn't been very kind to Alison then. She hadn't meant it really, but she'd been hurting, already grieving for Robert before he'd even gone, and the sight of Alison had brought out the absolute worst in her. But Alison would come; she'd said she would. Alison would be here soon, and then whatever else happened, Barb thought, at least she wouldn't have to face that awful coldness on her own. Relief brought tears to her eyes again, and clutching the dead phone against her chest with both hands, she sat in the wet dark and waited.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

Alison had said thirty minutes, but it was nearly twice that long before a cab stopped at the side of the road and let her out into the drizzling rain. In the interim, Barb had tried and failed to screw up her courage enough to wait directly in front of the house, but had managed to edge most of the way down the street toward it. As Alison banged the cab door shut, she walked the remaining distance, and Alison, hearing the echo of her footsteps, turned around. She was zipped into a shiny blue waterproof jacket and holding an umbrella, and she stared with raised eyebrows at Barb, who felt her cheeks get hot as she realised how bedraggled and pathetic she must look.

"What happened to _you_?" Alison asked.

Barb had spent most of the last hour thinking of what she might say when Alison asked her this question; how she could make it sound as if she'd just called Alison out of professional curiosity and not because she had panicked and forgot all logic and reason. Now that the moment was here, words failed her.

"There's something in my house," she blurted, and immediately cursed herself for sounding like a frightened little girl.

"Oh really?" Alison craned her neck to look at the open front door. "Well, since you've phoned me instead of the police, I assume it isn't a burglar, is it?"

Barb shook her head.

"Or a lot of religious people wanting to give you tracts and sing hymns at you?"

"No. It's - I don't know what it is."

"But you think it's a spirit," said Alison.

"I said I don't know, damn it! Are you going to help me or not? It wasn't easy for me to call you, you know. I wouldn't have bothered if I'd known you were going to stand here and make fun of me."

"I'm not making fun of you, Barbara," said Alison calmly. "You were scared enough to phone me up screaming and crying, and you don't do that sort of thing very often, do you?"

"No."

"Didn't think so. And I'll help you - not because you're my friend, but because you were Robert's - but in return you'll have to at least entertain the possibility that whatever scared you may have to do with the spirit world. Okay?"

Barb closed her eyes and turned her face up to the rainy sky for a moment. "All right," she said at last, looking back at Alison. "All right, okay, I did think that it might have been ... something like that. At first, anyway."

"That's a step in the right direction," said Alison. "Now let's go inside and sort it out."

Being reminded about her earlier behaviour was so humiliating, and the resulting anger so bracing, that Barb suddenly found herself able to lead the way up the path. Alison followed half a step behind, holding her umbrella high enough to cover both of them. At the front door, Barb stopped and stared.

"It was frozen," she said. "The door, I mean. It was covered in ice; I nearly had to break it down to get out. I suppose it must have melted ..." She poked at the mat with the toe of her boot, frowning. It was wet, all right, but so was everything else. Who was to say the rain wasn't responsible?

"Hmm," said Alison. "Go on."

Clenching her teeth, Barb stepped over the doorsill, dreading the moment when the horrible graveyard smell would hit her again. She sniffed tentatively, then breathed deeper, but smelt only the fresh paint she'd applied to the kitchen the previous week, with a faint under-note of dried flowers and orange peel from the bowl of potpourri on the foyer table. Cold air wafted in at her back, but it was the fresh, clean cold of a November night, not the bone-freezing chill she'd felt earlier. Inside the house, all was warm and dry; the heat was working again. She felt like groaning aloud.

_Well, that's it. I am definitely going mad_, she thought.

"You're blocking up the doorway," said Alison behind her. "Are we going in or what?"

"Let's not just yet," said Barb abruptly. "Look, I want to tell you what happened, but can't we do it someplace else? There's a café not far from here, and we can get warm and ... and talk." She turned round and looked at Alison, not wanting to plead, but hoping that Alison would see how important it was to her. The very thought of telling the story here, surrounded by the evidence that nothing was amiss, made her feel like a colossal fool.

Alison shrugged. "It doesn't matter to me."

"Good," said Barb, relieved. "I'll drive."

--------

_Christ, it's hot in here_, Alison thought. Barbara had turned the heater up as far as it would go as soon as they'd started driving, and the inside of the car was like a sauna. She supposed it must feel good if you were soaked through the way Barbara was, but if you weren't, it was just stifling. After a moment of struggling to unzip her jacket without undoing her seatbelt, she gave up and rode in silence, hoping she wouldn't faint before they got there.

"Here we are," said Barbara. Alison rubbed a clear spot on the fogged-up inside of her window and squinted at the café on the other side of the street.

_Why am I not surprised_? she wondered. It was exactly the sort of place she'd have expected a university professor to go, and even at a glance, far too expensive for someone who lived off a combination of freelance income and the dole. Not that she was going to tell Barbara that last bit.

"Could we go someplace else? "

"What for? It's just right there."

"Because I can't afford to spend that much," said Alison patiently. Barbara looked startled and then embarrassed. Alison said nothing. She supposed there might have been a time in Barbara's life when she'd had to think about things like the cost of a cup of coffee, but if so, those days were clearly long past; this sleek BMW of hers must have cost three times what Alison saw in a year.

"It's all right, I'll pay," said Barbara, recovering. "Come on, they have cake and biscuits and all sorts of other things, and I haven't had dinner."

Alison eyed the café and weighed the benefits of getting out now against staying in the blazing-hot car.

"All right," she said, and reached for the door handle.

Barbara tried to coax her to order food, but Alison wasn't having any of it; taking money for a reading or séance was one thing, but she wasn't a charity case to be fed. She sat at the table and warmed her hands on her tea mug while Barbara stuffed notes into her wallet and her wallet into her bag. She was really quite pretty, Alison thought, regarding her critically, even with her eyes puffy from tears and her hair curling out of control as it dried. She was strong, too: she'd been beside herself with terror an hour ago, and now she was preparing to eat cake as if nothing had happened. Her hands shook a little as she put her bag on the floor and cut the first bite, but other than that, she looked relatively calm, which was more than Alison could say for many of her clients.

"Okay," she said when Barbara had got through about half the slice of cake, "now tell me exactly what happened at your house."

Barbara looked down at the table. "I probably imagined it," she said, so softly that Alison could hardly hear her. She picked some cake crumbs off the tabletop and deposited them, one by one, in a paper napkin.

"Maybe you did and maybe you didn't, but I won't know till you explain."

"All right, all right." Barbara heaved a sigh and began. "I went to put some flowers on my brother's grave today. He died a long time ago, but I go every year for his birthday. While I was at the graveyard I - oh, this is so stupid!"

Alison waited, saying nothing, until Barbara was forced to continue.

"I saw a grave, an old one, off to the side, by itself. I'd seen it before, but today it just looked ... I don't know ... sad somehow. I took a flower over to it and there was a sort of a nasty smell, and I had a funny feeling."

"What sort of a feeling?"

"As if someone was there." Barbara said reluctantly. "I said it was stupid."

"Go on."

"Well, I didn't like it, so I left. It's a long drive back, and nothing happened the whole time. But when I got home -" she bit her lip "-when I got home, the inside of my house was freezing, colder than outside. I went to check the heat and then all of a sudden that smell from the graveyard was there. It was awful; it smelt like something dead. I'm sure I must have brought it in with me somehow, but it was so strong, I don't know why I didn't smell it in the car ..." She trailed off, and Alison waited again.

"I couldn't bear it and I wanted to get outside, but it was so cold, and the front door was frozen shut. I had that same feeling that someone was there, watching me, and I panicked a little - oh, all right, I panicked a lot. I got the door open and I went up the road, and I, I got sick all over somebody's shrubbery." Barbara's voice was starting to tremble; if she'd been anyone else, Alison would have reached across the table and taken her hand, but she wasn't certain Barbara would appreciate the gesture.

"Go on," she said again.

"And then I phoned you," Barbara said, and stabbed at her cake with her fork. "Do you want the rest of this? I'm not hungry anymore."

Alison shook her head. "Tell me more about this presence you felt."

"Isn't 'presence' a bit melodramatic? Next you'll be calling it an 'entity.'"

"Maybe, if that's the right word for it." Alison put her mug down and leaned across the table. "It doesn't matter what I call it, Barbara. There _was_ something there. I can see it in your eyes. You know it, and I know it. So talk to me."

"I don't know what to say," said Barbara in a heated voice. "Yes, it was there, I felt it, what else is there to tell?"

"Lots," said Alison. "Did it feel friendly? Angry? Sad? Did it feel like a person? Like someone you know?"

"It wasn't my brother, if that's what you're getting at. He wouldn't frighten me. He was the eldest, he looked after me and our other brother."

"Sometimes spirits frighten us without meaning to," Alison said. "They may not realise that they're dead or know that the things they do upset us. Or they may know it, but what they have to say is so important that they can't stop trying." She paused, watching Barbara's eyebrows draw together in thought. "Do you think someone was trying to tell you something?"

"No," said Barbara slowly. "It was ... it was a waiting feeling, the sort you get when it's your turn to speak."

"Really? That's interesting."

"Why?" Barbara sounded nervous. "Have you never heard of that before?"

"I've heard of nearly everything before," said Alison, "and what I haven't heard of doesn't surprise me." She picked up her mug again and drank the last of her tea. "I know you don't want to go back to your house, but I don't think we'll be able to work out what really happened until we do. Best to do it sooner rather than later, don't you think?"

"I suppose."

Alison started to get up, but Barbara reached out and put a hand on her arm to stop her.

"Wait. Before we go, I want to apologise to you."

"For what?"

"For the way I treated you last year, when we bumped into each other outside the hospital. I didn't believe you could have seen Robert; I thought you were just trying to manipulate me, and Jude. If I'd been thinking clearly I would have known straight away that you were as upset as we were. I should have been kinder, and I'm sorry."

"And do you believe now that I could have seen him?"

"I believe that you believed it," said Barbara carefully. "I don't know if it was real, but I don't know if what _I_ saw and felt tonight was real. I just don't know."

"Welcome to my world," said Alison, and smiled.

--------

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

Barb was freezing again.

Prior to this evening, the coldest she'd ever been was a few years before, when she'd gone to an international psychology conference in Chicago. It had been the dead of winter, and the wind screaming down the long avenues between the skyscrapers had chilled her right to the bone, but even that had been nothing compared to this. She leant against the wet tile wall of the shower with her eyes closed and her arms folded tightly across her front, shivering despite the billows of steam all around her.

It was the house. The house was killing her.

It couldn't be anything else, could it? She'd felt much better on the way back from the cafe, and when she and Alison had come up the walk for the second time that night, she'd been thinking not of awful smells or strange feelings, but of having a good, long shower, putting on dry clothes, and pouring herself a massive drink, in that order. Never mind the fussy little glasses; she was going to have a bloody tankard full.

With that soothing idea in her mind, she'd unlocked the front door and let herself and Alison in. Everything had been in order: the heat rattling and clanking away as usual, the cat, who'd been missing earlier in the evening, sleeping curled up on the sofa. She'd shown Alison where everything had happened, left her to do whatever it was she did, and fled upstairs, desperate to get clean. But before she'd made it to her bedroom, she'd felt cold seeping into her, and by the time she'd got undressed she'd been covered with gooseflesh. She'd turned the hot tap on as far as it would go and stood under the spray until her skin turned lobster-red, but it still felt as if all her blood had gone to ice in her veins.

When the water started to cool, she gave up, wrapped herself in a towel and went back into the bedroom to look for something to wear. It was deathly quiet downstairs, and she wondered what Alison was doing - having a psychic chat? Carving a spirit board? Lying on the floor in a trance? She wasn't certain what to expect from the woman: she wasn't the expert on mediumship that Robert had been, and though he'd told her about some of his experiences with Alison, those conversations had grown more and more infrequent as his illness progressed. Near the end he'd even stopped discussing his book with her, and she had never seen the entire manuscript, only the early chapters they'd worked on together and the bits and pieces of notes she'd found in his office. She'd tucked those away in her own files, even though by rights she ought probably have given them to Jude, because she had wanted something that had belonged to him. It still hurt to think that he'd died not trusting her anymore, and she felt a bitter stab of anger at Alison for driving that wedge between them. All those years of friendship, all the time she'd spent encouraging him, supporting him, comforting him, loving him, all wrecked in a matter of months by one person's madness.

_And who was the one convinced him to take up with her in the first place?_

"Me," Barb said under her breath, slamming a drawer so roughly that she caught her hand in it. "It was me, it was all my fault, I know. I know, I know, I know."

She looked down at her hand, which was pinched and oozing blood from a torn fingernail, and wanted to cry for at least the tenth time since she'd got up that morning. God, she had to get hold of herself. She imagined what she'd write about her own mental state on an intake form -- _The patient, a 44-year-old woman, is emotionally labile and easily moved to tears. She reports sensory hallucinations, including sensations of extreme cold. She is upset over the recent death of a friend and blames an unknown person, whom she calls "Alison," for damaging their relationship_ -- and cringed. No, it wasn't fair to be angry at Alison. Alison had come when she hadn't had to, she'd listened patiently to a wild story, and so far she'd neither asked for money nor tried to make vague, impressive-sounding pronouncements about the "presence." She deserved the benefit of the doubt. Although, Barb thought, it would be good to know exactly what she was doing down there. The silence was unnerving.

She went back into the bathroom, stuck a plaster haphazardly round her bleeding finger, and then got dressed, wrapping up as warmly as possible in a long-sleeved top, heavy wool jumper, thick corduroy trousers and socks. After a moment's consideration, she added a knitted scarf as well, but stopped short of putting on gloves. It didn't matter anyway. The cold felt as if it were coming from inside her; the clothes were still chilly to the touch even after she'd had them on for a few minutes, as if she had no living warmth to give them.

Just for an instant, she wondered if she were really dead and only Alison could see her - if she'd been killed in a wreck on the way home from the graveyard, or even on the way there. But no, that was ridiculous, she assured herself quickly. Even if ghosts really existed, and she still had no concrete proof that they did, she'd spoken to other people in the cafe, and she was sure a ghost couldn't do that, or eat and drink for that matter. But the idea had made her heart flip-flop unpleasantly in her chest, and she didn't think she wanted to be alone any longer. She shoved her feet into a dry pair of shoes and left the room, closing the door a little too hard behind her.

---

Downstairs, Alison wandered around Barbara's front room, examining her possessions. Barbara didn't have much in the way of ornaments - too busy to dust them, probably - but she did have lots and lots and lots of framed photos, hanging on the walls and resting on shelves and tables. Most of them were of people Alison didn't know and places she'd never seen, but she recognised a few. Here were Robert and Barbara at some sort of party, looking relaxed and happy and more than a bit drunk. Here was little Josh in front of a birthday cake with four candles, his mother beside him to help blow them out.

Alison smiled. She knew Josh so well; they'd talked so many times, whispering to each other in the darkness of her bedroom. Josh had told her all about his mummy and daddy and his friends, and yes, even about his Aunty Barb. _Aunty Barb is nice. Aunty Barb is sad for Daddy._ Alison hadn't seen all that much evidence of Aunty Barb's niceness yet, but if Joshie had loved her, then there must be something good inside her. Children had an instinct for knowing which grownups really liked them and which were just pretending.

She touched Josh's sweet face gently with the tip of one finger and moved on to a photo of Barbara at what people politely referred to as "the awkward age," wearing a school uniform and a sulky adolescent pout. The Barbara in the picture was flanked by two boys - the brothers she'd mentioned, Alison guessed - one a year or two younger, the other quite a bit older, and so strikingly handsome that Alison had to stop herself gawking. Any too-early death was a tragedy, she thought, but it seemed almost criminal for such a beautiful young man to be taken from this world. No wonder his sister still remembered him fondly all these years later.

In the distance, she heard the faint sound of water running: almost as soon as they'd got in, Barbara had excused herself to go and tidy up, and she'd been gone ever since, apparently having the world's longest shower. Alison was beginning to wonder whether she'd fallen asleep in there, or slipped in a puddle and knocked herself out. Soaking in the bath was one thing, but how long could anyone just stand there getting wet?

Sighing, she looked round the room again. Lots of lovely, expensive pale wood furniture - none of that build-it-yourself Ikea rubbish for Dr Sinyard - but no television, unless one was hiding in the kitchen or an upstairs bedroom. Against a far wall, two tall bookcases, which she'd already examined and found full of psychology books. And that was all. Nothing was out of place; nothing revealed that anything unusual had ever happened here.

But something _had_ happened. She'd felt it as soon as Barbara let her past the front door. It was impossible to explain a feeling like that to anyone who hadn't experienced it, but it was there: a vague unease, a disturbance in the air, as if someone had stirred things up and left currents and eddies swirling everywhere. She knew better than to think she could force whatever was causing the feeling to manifest itself; all she could do was stay open and welcoming and try to reassure the spirit that it was safe to speak to her. Barbara had been insistent that it wasn't her brother, and Alison was inclined to agree. The most logical conclusion was that whatever had happened had something to do with the unmarked grave where Barbara had left her impulsive gift of flowers.

Yes, that was logical, all right, even though it wasn't what she wanted to think, wasn't the idea that had leapt full-blown into her mind as soon as she heard Barbara's terrified voice on the phone: that somehow, in some way, Robert was involved. Robert might very well have wanted to talk to Barbara - like it or not, she'd been someone important to him. But Robert had crossed over, Alison had seen him go herself, and people who had crossed over didn't come back, not ever. And even if he could come back, she'd no right to wish that he would. He was at peace, and that was where he belonged, no matter how much she might like to hear his voice or see his smile one more time.

_It's not him_, she told herself. _It doesn't feel right._ It didn't - in death, Robert had been sad and confused, but resigned, and she couldn't sense any of those things here, and yet, and yet -

"Are you here?" she said softly, into the empty room. "Is it you?"

"Who are you talking to?" asked a voice behind her.

"Shit!" She whirled round and found Barbara standing there, looking fresh-scrubbed and smelling like the inside of a Lush shop. "Don't scare me like that. I thought you were still upstairs. What were you trying to do up there anyway, drown yourself?"

Barbara frowned at her. "I was just having a shower, for God's sake. There's no need to be rude about it."

"Sorry. You startled me, that's all." She looked Barbara up and down. "You're shivering."

"I can't get warm." Barbara rubbed her arms restlessly, and Alison noticed a faint bluish cast around her lips and fingertips. "I can feel the heat coming out of the grates, but it doesn't reach inside me. Aren't you cold?"

Alison opened her mouth to say she wasn't, but before she could get the words out, she realised that the room had got noticeably chillier in the last few seconds, as if Barbara had brought winter with her when she entered.

"A bit," she said.

"Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one," said Barbara. "I was thinking, perhaps there's a window open somewhere, and the cross-draft -"

"Shush," said Alison. She took a few steps toward the centre of the room and turned in a slow circle, listening, then looked back at Barbara, who was watching her warily through narrowed eyes.

"Something's here," she said.

---


	4. Chapter 4

---

"What do you mean something's here?" Barb asked sharply. "There's not ... I don't see anything."

"I don't see anything either," Alison said, still turning in circles, and looking, Barb thought, completely daft. "But that doesn't mean there's nothing there. I feel it. I feel it. You do too."

"I don't." Barb took a step away from Alison, shaking her head. "I'm only cold, that's all. It isn't like before." On the sofa near her, she saw the drowsing cat suddenly raise his head and sniff at the air with whiskers quivering. She scooped him up and tried to cuddle him, hoping for a bit of comfort, but he stiffened in her arms and laid his ears back, and she had to put him down again. As soon as his paws touched the floor, he flattened himself out and wriggled under the sofa.

"Alec, no!" she said helplessly as the grey striped tip of his tail disappeared.

"He knows," said Alison. She had stopped turning and was standing stock-still in the centre of the room, head cocked to one side. "Animals always know; their senses are stronger than ours. Children are the same way. How old were you when your brother died?"

"Thirteen. What does that have to do with anything?"

"Strange he never tried to contact you." Alison turned wide, guileless blue eyes on her. "At that age, and a girl - you should have been more sensitive to it than anyone. Are you sure there wasn't anything?"

"No, there wasn't," said Barb, "and I already told you that --" She stumbled, not wanting to say Paul's name in case Alison might file it away to use later. "That my brother wouldn't hurt me. Even if I believed in spirits I wouldn't believe that."

"I don't think it's your brother hurting you," Alison said. "Come on, let's have a look round together." She stretched out a hand, and Barb stared at it for a moment before realising that she was meant to take it. Rather reluctantly, she did so. Alison's fingers were long and narrow and very warm against her own icy ones, and she found herself clinging without meaning to, as if she were a little girl and Alison were her mother.

"Sorry," she said stiffly, making a conscious effort to relax her grip.

"It's all right." Alison gave her a small, reassuring squeeze and began walking, stopping every few seconds to raise her head and stare into the empty air. They went out through the dining room and into the kitchen, where Barb, now shivering so hard her teeth were beginning to chatter, looked longingly at the electric kettle and thought of steaming hot cups of tea and chocolate and coffee.

"Let go a moment," said Alison. Barb did as she'd been asked and watched Alison move away, trailing her fingertips along the granite work surface. It all seemed very surreal, she thought: that she had engaged the services of a self-described psychic, for starters, but more so that anything supernatural could happen here, in her own newly redone home. Why couldn't she have had a burglar instead? She knew what to do about a burglar. You sprayed him with mace or whanged him over the head with a pan, and then you rang the police and they came to take him away.

While she was thinking all this, Alison had made a circuit round the kitchen and finished up at the door that led to the conservatory.

"You don't want to go out there, do you?" asked Barb, hoping the answer was no. Even at the best of times, she hated the conservatory after dark, when the glass was black and flat and it felt as if she were on display, a solitary player on a brightly lit stage with an invisible audience.

"No, I don't think so," Alison said. She gave Barb a long, searching look. "Go ahead of me, back into the lounge."

"Why?"

"Go on," Alison said. Her tone invited no argument, and Barb wondered whether it was the one she had used as a nurse to get recalcitrant patients to take their medicine or go for a walk in the corridor. If so, it must have worked rather well. Before she knew she was doing it, she'd gone back through the kitchen door and was standing obediently near the sofa where Alec still hid, shivering and hugging herself in a desperate bid for warmth. In a moment, Alison joined her.

"It follows you," Alison murmured. "But it wasn't in the car with us, or at the cafe. Step outside for a minute now, would you?"

An even deeper chill sank into Barb's stomach, like a long blade made of ice. No matter how hard she tried to fight it, the notion of an invisible companion shadowing her every step left her almost too frightened to breathe. God, if there was really something there ... and Alison wanted her to go outside, alone, where anything might happen to her. She opened her mouth to protest, but then shut it again; she might be scared witless, but she didn't have to let Alison know it.

Steeling herself, she walked to the front door, undid the lock, turned the knob, and marched out into the dripping front garden. Above her, the moon flashed silver-bright between the ragged edges of fast-moving clouds. The road was dark and silent, and as she waited, she felt the shudders start to ease a bit. It was definitely warmer outside than in.

"Stay there," Alison called from inside. Barb craned her neck, trying to get a look through the front windows so she could make out what Alison was doing, but she couldn't see anything. The next thing she knew, Alison was coming out the front door, and for some inexplicable reason, carrying Barb's handbag and keys.

"What are you doing? Why have you got my things?"

"Here," said Alison. She pushed the key ring into Barb's hand with fingers that felt colder than snow, and Barb gasped before she could stop herself.

_It's a delusion, a perception_, she told herself with all the hard rationality she could muster. _It feels cold because I expect cold._ She remembered doing an essay on the subject as an undergraduate, making notes at a table in the university library. If she shut her eyes, she could see the words in her own writing, filling up the page of an exercise book: _Each stimulus, as the subject gets it, feels colder than the previous one ..._ But Alison's hand hadn't been cold before. Not at all. She had come outside and got warm, and Alison had stayed inside and got cold, and try as she might, she could produce no explanation for that.

"I don't understand," she said. It came out as a moan.

"I don't either," said Alison. "I've never felt anything like it before. It's not the sort of spirit I'm used to. But I can tell you this much: it's stuck inside your house. It wants to follow you out but it can't. It stops at the doorway and that makes it angry."

"And what do you propose I do about it?"

"I don't know yet," said Alison. "But I don't think we ought to hang about until I can work it out. Is there a friend or a neighbour you can stay with?"

Barb thought of Robert, whom she could have rung at any time for any reason, and nearly choked on an unexpected sob. Robert was dead and burnt to ashes, and who would be there for her if not him? There was Jude, but Jude had got back together with Clive, and she didn't think she could spend a night under the same roof as Clive to save her life. There was her niece Lauren, but Lauren had a new baby and wouldn't appreciate a midnight visitor; there was Jane who was no doubt still at the pub; there was Mark who was away on holiday with his family ...

"No," she said. "No one I could phone up on such short notice." _And no one I could tell the truth to_, she did not add. The idea of explaining to any of her colleagues that she was fleeing from a ghost that had somehow got trapped in her house was appalling.

"Well, I suppose you could stay with me for tonight, then. Are you all right to drive us there? You look ready to fall over."

"Thanks a lot," said Barb sourly.

"I don't mean anything by it," said Alison with a gentle smile. "You're tired, that's all. So am I. This sort of work takes it right out of me."

Barb bit her lip in indecision. On the one hand, she wanted to get away from here as soon as possible. On the other, she didn't like admitting, even tacitly, that Alison was right.

"Oh, come on," Alison said. "I promise not to bring out the Tarot cards or muck about with your aura or anything like that. We'll have a drink, go to bed, and work out what to do in the morning. All right?"

"All right," Barb said at last.

---

TBC


	5. Chapter 5

---

Alison rolled over and looked at her bedside clock for the tenth time in an hour.

"Fuck," she said aloud. Leave it to her stupid, stupid, stupid body to decide to stay awake all night when she was shattered and could barely see straight. Bloody useless body didn't know what was good for it.

Flopping onto her stomach, she buried her head in a pillow and let out a muffled scream of frustration, then one more for good measure. Then she flung back the duvet and swung her legs over the side of the bed, feeling around with bare toes for her slippers. Her usual cure for insomnia was to go downstairs, grab the nearest bottle and drink until she couldn't keep her eyes open any longer, but that wasn't an option now, not least because she had a guest in the house. She would have to try the old hot-milk trick instead.

She padded down the stairs and through the open front room, stopping for a moment to observe Barbara sleeping on her sofa. She'd brought all her spare blankets down, and Barbara had used every one, wrapping herself in layers of pink fluff and green knitting and scratchy brown tartan until she was all but invisible. At least she'd finally got well warmed, Alison thought. Spirits who wanted to injure living people usually did it by frightening them until they injured themselves, either accidentally or on purpose, but Barbara had been so pale and cold for a while that Alison had begun to worry about hypothermia. She'd pinked up nicely, though, and her respiration was normal. She would be fine.

_Wish I could say the same for both of us_, Alison thought grimly, leaving Barbara to sleep and going into the kitchen to rummage around for a pan. She hadn't felt at all well since they'd left Barbara's house; she was keyed up and exhausted all at once, and still shaken from her brush with the spirit she'd encountered. She hadn't been able to see it or hear it, only to feel its ... well, she supposed you'd have to call them emotions, even though they weren't what most people would recognise as such. They'd been very strong and very simple, like the feelings of an animal, or something that had almost forgotten what it meant to be human. Anger - yes, definitely, it had been furious when it couldn't follow Barbara outside. Hate too, and resentment, but at the same time, a sort of desperate yearning. It had reminded her of a dog her neighbour had kept when she was a little girl, a nasty thing that had lived its whole life chained up in the back garden, alternately barking at everyone who walked past and whimpering at its owners' door in hopes of being let in.

The great question, she thought, setting the pan of milk on the cooker ring and adjusting the flame, was how something like that had got into Barbara's house in the first place, and more importantly, why it couldn't leave again. What was keeping it in? It wasn't Barbara herself; the thing had all but killed her when they were inside together. Another spirit - no, she would have seen it, wouldn't she?

Alison dipped her finger into the milk to test its temperature and sucked the drips off thoughtfully. All at once an idea struck her, and she turned off the fire, went quietly into the other room, scooped up Barbara's handbag and brought it into the kitchen. She was hoping to find some sort of talisman or good-luck charm - she couldn't imagine Barbara ever buying such a thing on her own, but maybe she'd been given something that she carried around to humour the giver. But a poke through the bag's contents yielded only the ordinary clutter of keys and money and lipstick and Tampax, and in disappointment, Alison put everything to rights again, returned the bag to its resting place on her green armchair, and came back to the kitchen to perk up her hot milk with a splash of brandy. Once she'd got it to her liking, she sat down at the table and sipped slowly, thinking. In the other room, she heard Barbara cough and rustle around on the sofa, but ignored her; she'd settle down again in a minute.

"Can't you sleep?"

Alison looked up from her cup and before she could stop herself, let out a snigger at the sight of Barbara standing there trailing blankets, her eyes bleary with sleep, her clothes all mussed, and her hair a wild tangle of curls. She rather expected Barbara to be cross about being laughed at, but instead the corners of Barbara's mouth curled up, and she said, "I'm a mess, aren't I?"

"You're a bloody _wreck,_" said Alison. Barbara's half-smile turned into a grin, and Alison suddenly found herself liking her much more than she previously had. She was glad she hadn't got caught nosing about in Barbara's personal belongings.

"Want some?" she asked, indicating the pan that still sat on the cooker, but Barbara shook her head.

"I don't like milk. I never have. My brother used to drink mine for me when no one was looking."

"Your brother - the one who died?" Alison asked as gently as possible.

"Yes." Barbara gathered her blankets underneath her and sat in an empty kitchen chair. "He was six years older. He did everything you could possibly want a big brother to do - walked me to school, pushed me on the swings, taught me to tie my shoes."

"Sounds nice," said Alison.

"Very nice," said Barbara. She paused. "It's because of him I went into psychology, you know. He was going to do his degree in it; he showed me his books when he was home for Christmas during his first year of uni. When my mum and I went to clear out his things after he was killed, she was going to give the books away, but I took them home with me instead. I wanted to read what he'd been reading, to feel close to him."

"Did you, then? Feel close to him?"

Barbara shook her head again. "There wasn't anything to be close to. He was gone. But the books helped me understand the way everyone, including me, had reacted to his death. The accident was senseless, but our behaviour, our response, it all had a logical explanation."

"And you like things to have logical explanations," Alison prompted.

"Oh, you're quite the amateur psychologist yourself, aren't you? Of course I do. That's why this -" she made a vague gesture, "this is - it's intolerable. The only explanation for it, the only one, is that I'm losing my mind, and I can't - I'd rather be dead myself than be a patient in a psychiatric ward. I know too much about what goes on in them." She looked up and Alison saw tears brimming in her eyes. "I'm sorry - Robert told me you had been -"

"Yeah, I was," Alison said. "I don't recommend it." She leant forward. "But Barbara, I wasn't crazy. I wasn't, and neither are you. There are things that can't be explained by psychology, or any other sort of science, and this is one of them. And we're going to sort it out, you and I, together. Okay?"

"O-okay," Barbara said. Her voice caught, and Alison pushed the milk aside and got up to hug her, blankets and all.

"It's not your fault," she said. "I forget how hard it is to believe in what you can't see. It's different for me."

Barbara had been holding herself stiff in Alison's embrace, but now the tension drained out of her and she sagged against Alison's shoulder.

"How can you bear it?" she whispered.

"Sometimes I can't." Alison said. She lifted her hand and smoothed Barbara's hair gently, the way her mother had always done to her. "Sometimes I can't."

---

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

"Professor Sinyard!"

Barb heard the words the way she sometimes heard her alarm clock in a dream, faintly but persistently. It took her a moment to realise that the boy seated across the desk had said her name more than once, and then another moment to drag her attention back to him.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"I said, are you all right? You've been a million miles away since I sat down, and, er, I asked you a question and you haven't answered it." His dark skin went even darker with embarrassment. "I'm sorry, I'm just a bit worried."

"There's no need to be." Barb manufactured what she hoped was a comforting smile, although from the expression on his face she thought it must not be a very good one. "I had a late night, that's all. What did you want to ask, Jason? It is Jason, isn't it?"

"Right. From the psychobiology lecture. I said when I came in. You sure everything's okay, then?"

"Absolutely fine," said Barb. In her peripheral vision, she saw the Web site she'd been reading earlier still open on her monitor, and hastily minimised it, feeling as if she'd been caught with a screen full of pornography. Actually, she thought a few photos of honest, straightforward shagging might have been less embarrassing than the lurid green letters that spelt _Spirits, Spectres and Lost Souls_ across a black background.

"Let's have that question again," she said a bit too firmly.

After Jason left, still giving her odd looks over his shoulder, she got up, locked the office door behind him, and dropped back into her chair, which squeaked shrilly in protest. Through the window beside her desk, she saw the leaden grey sky beginning to spit rain again, and people on the road below putting up their hoods and popping open umbrellas. Her own umbrella was at home, sitting quietly at the bottom of the coat stand, where it might as well have been on the moon for all the good it would do her. She was going to get soaked. Again.

_Never mind_, she told herself. _If I survived last night, a bit of damp will hardly do me in._

Turning back to her computer, she brought the minimised window up again and leant close to peer at the hard-to-read text. It was at least the twentieth paranormal site she'd visited so far, and like all the others, it offered lots of wild eyewitness accounts and fuzzy photographs of "orbs" and "apparitions," but nothing to soothe the troubled mind of a scientist who wanted hard proof that she hadn't gone completely off her head. Alison's reassurances had been enough to get her through the rest of the night, but this morning had been a different story. She'd woken up with an aching back and a feeling of deep embarrassment, remembering every dreadful thing she'd done, from throwing up on the pavement to weeping in Alison's arms. It was like all the worst bits of having drunk too much, only without the excuse of actually having been drunk.

After an awkward good-morning and a brief conversation, she'd refused Alison's offer of breakfast and fled to the university in hopes of getting to a place where she felt safe and in command of herself. But almost as soon as she'd arrived, she'd begun to think she ought not to have bothered. She couldn't focus on anything for more than a few seconds, and despite her efforts with lipstick and hairbrush, she looked exactly as if she'd spent the night on someone's sofa, which of course she had. Well, at least she'd proven that it wasn't possible to die of shame: if it were, she would be lying cold on a slab somewhere by now.

Sighing, she picked up her phone and flipped it open out of force of habit. Alison had said that she would go round again during the day to see if anything had changed, and to put out some food for Alec, whom they'd had to leave inside. Normally, Barb resisted giving anyone a key to her house - she'd had to have the locks changed once before when a former partner had refused to stop letting himself in - but under the circumstances she'd relented and let Alison take the spare she kept taped to the inside of her glove box. Now she was consumed with curiosity, but Alison didn't have a mobile of her own and there was no way to reach her.

_There must be a joke in there someplace_, she thought. _'Why doesn't a medium need a mobile?' Ha ha. _

She scrolled down her list of stored numbers, flinching a little as she passed Robert's name. She hadn't been able to bring herself to delete him yet; it felt too much like deleting him off the face of the earth. As long as his number was still there, she could imagine that it was possible to ring him up and ask his opinion or tell him a funny story or talk to him about something that was bothering her. What would Robert have said about this situation with Alison and the - the thing?

"Keep an open mind," she said. Her voice was unnaturally loud in the quiet office. "No blanket dismissals ... and no blanket acceptance, either."

Right then. She would keep an open mind. But she would do it whilst gathering evidence - hard, empirical evidence - to prove one way or another what was going on. She'd let herself get drawn into the trap of emotion last night; she'd been scared and confused and had clung to anything that proffered an explanation for what had happened to her. She couldn't afford to do that again. Strong and rational, that was what she had to be, what she had always been. Strong and rational had got her through the deaths of her brother and father and the loss of her best friend. It would get her through this experience as well.

With that thought, she briskly punched up her own home number, hoping that she might catch Alison in the midst of her errand and get her to answer. She waited through the message and then said "Alison, are you there?

Nothing.

She said "Alison?" again, imagining the sound echoing through all the tidy, empty rooms, with no one to hear it except the cat. Still nothing. Perhaps if Alison hadn't come yet, she would listen to the messages when she arrived? Barb didn't know her well enough to say, but she certainly knew what _she_ would do in Alison's position.

"Right, well, if you hear this, I've been thinking and -"

Before she could get the rest of the sentence out, a sudden harsh, crackling noise filled her head, so loud that she instinctively jerked the phone away as pain drilled into her ear. It slipped out of her hand and fell onto the desk, where it lay hissing like an angry viper for two or three seconds before the sound stopped completely.

Barb stared down at it, open-mouthed, waiting for the click that would tell her the connection had been dropped, but none came. After a moment, she extended a trembling hand toward the phone, scooped it up slowly, and put it back to her ear. The silence on the other end was almost worse than the noise had been. It made her want to shout into the mouthpiece just to break it, and yet at the same time, there was a distinct air of _listening_ about it.

It wasn't the silence of a dead line. It was the silence of someone waiting on the other end, waiting and waiting for her to speak.

TBC


	7. Chapter 7

Barb clattered down the echoing stairwell of the building that housed her department's offices, her laptop bag banging awkwardly into her hip with every step. She had stuck a notice to the corkboard outside her office saying that she was ill, which was not entirely true, but seemed the most plausible explanation for suddenly vanishing halfway through the day.

At the bottom of the stairs, a set of double doors led directly to a short flight of outer steps, and thence to the pavement. She slammed through the doors at full speed, and then stopped at the head of the steps for a moment, thrown off by the transition from the stuffy interior, with its smells of wet boots and floor wax and old books, to the crisp, drizzly outdoor air. The shock of it cleared her head a bit, and she took a few deep, steadying breaths. It was going to be all right, really it was. She was not going to run off half-cocked; she was going to drive home calmly, with deliberation and forethought, and see for herself that there was nothing that could have made that noise down the phone line. And then when she next spoke to Alison, she would set it forth as an example of how easily a simple coincidence could seem like something supernatural.

_All right, Barbara Anne_. It wasn't Robert's voice she imagined this time, but Paul's: deep and masculine, but still youthful, just as it had been the last time they spoke. _You're the clever one in the family. Let's hear your explanation for what else it could have been. _

_Anything_, she thought back. _Interference, a loose connector, cosmic radiation hitting a mobile phone mast somewhere - who knows?_

She stopped, feeling stupidly satisfied, as if she'd proven a point. Cars zipped past on the wet road. A young couple strolled toward her, hands entwined, rucksacks slung over their shoulders. Then:

_Or a ghost_, said the Paul-voice.

"Oh, stop it," Barb groaned aloud. The boy and girl broke off their conversation and glanced at her, and she looked away swiftly. This was ridiculous. She could stand here on the steps all day, having make-believe arguments with her dead brother, or she could just go home and put an end to all debate. Perhaps if she were very lucky, she'd bump into Alison there and kill two birds with one stone.

_No! Don't go alone. It isn't safe. Get Alison first. _

The voice had a distinctly alarmed ring to it this time, and Barb flinched; it was beginning to sound a bit too separate from her own personality for comfort. She had talked to herself off and on all her life - there was nothing abnormal about that, highly intelligent people were known for it, and Barb had no false modesty about her intellectual gifts. It was when the imaginary voices started speaking on their own that the trouble began.

_Bugger that for a game of soldiers_, she thought, and shouldering her laptop bag, started walking.

Her resolute mood carried her all the way to the car park, into her car, and out into the flow of midday traffic. She made it round the first corner, and then suddenly felt weak and giddy and horrible all over, and had to pull over abruptly and sit very still, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Every time she thought she was getting better, another wave hit and made her clutch the wheel for support. She leant her head against the slick, rain-cooled glass of the window and shut her eyes, listening to drops pattering on the windscreen and praying to whatever powers there were that she wasn't going to be sick again. One bout of that in twenty-four hours was more than enough.

As the worst of the nausea slowly ebbed, she realised that last night's sickness might actually be the source of her trouble. She'd lost most of what she'd eaten yesterday, and the only thing she'd had since then was half a slice of cake; her blood sugar had probably fallen off the bottom of the chart by now. She'd scolded Robert a hundred times for getting stuck into work so deeply that he forgot to eat, and now here she was doing the same thing.

Cautiously, she opened her eyes and peered through the wet window. There was a deli not far from here where she and he had gone for lunch on occasion; perhaps she ought to stop there and get something before she went home, to fortify herself for whatever she might find when she arrived. She thought she'd walk, though. She didn't trust herself to drive any further in this state.

---

"And you don't think it's the brother?"

"No, I don't."

Alison wrapped the telephone cord tightly round her wrist, making it lie flat and smooth, then unwound it again and inspected the marks it had left on her skin. "It's something awful, Helen. I've spoken to angry spirits before, but this thing - it's wicked."

There was a pause on the other end of the line, during which Alison could hear the raucous sounds of a game show in the background. Helen was one of her Aunty Vi's old friends, still sticking in there at eighty-seven, and she was so plagued by the voices of spirits that she turned the television right up to drown them out. Alison sympathised -- she'd done the same thing often enough herself -- but it made having a conversation difficult, particularly as Helen was also beginning to go rather deaf.

"Helen? Are you there?"

"Sorry, darling, I was thinking," Helen said, but Alison suspected she'd nodded off for a moment. "Have you been to the graveyard yet?"

"Not yet. I've got to get Barbara to drive me there; I can't take a cab that far, and trains and I don't mix any longer."

"Go soon," Helen advised. "Have a look at that grave and see if you can find out who's buried in it. You do know what day yesterday was, don't you?"

Alison's gaze drifted to her battered old chest of drawers, where yesterday's cold votives still stood in their pools of hardened white wax. "'Course I do. I lit candles."

"Good, good," said Helen, and then went quiet again. The game show ended, and Alison waited through an advert for toothpaste and then one for Doritos.

"Helen ..."

"Don't 'Helen' me," said the old lady tartly, as if she knew she'd been caught out. Then her voice softened. "Look after yourself, darling. And look after your friend too. If this spirit's set its sights on her, she could be in real danger, and not believing will only make her more vulnerable. She'll take risks."

Alison thought of saying that Barbara wasn't her friend, but it didn't seem worth the trouble of keeping Helen awake long enough to explain the real relationship between them. Instead, she promised to be careful, feeling like the eleven-year-old she'd been when she and Helen first met, and put the phone down in its cradle before letting her head drop back against the ancient flocked wallpaper.

She really didn't want to do this: didn't want to deal with Barbara's alternating terror and denial, didn't want to go to graveyards and poke through old burial records, didn't want to confront that grim presence in Barbara's house, didn't even want to go and feed the cat. She wanted to sit right here on her bedroom floor and drink wine all afternoon and pretend there were no such things as spirits. Even half a bottle would help - she could sip slowly, make it last -

No. She couldn't go there. What was more, she wouldn't. She'd never been an alcoholic like the sort that had come bleeding and vomiting and fighting into the A&E departments she'd worked in, but she'd known even before Robert had come along that her drinking had crossed the line from heavy to compulsive. Since he'd been gone, she'd been making a real effort to rein it in, restricting herself to a single glass of wine with dinner, or one shot of something harder afterward. He hadn't saved her life for her to chuck it away like an empty chocolate-bar wrapper; she owed it to him to do something with herself, even if she wasn't certain anymore what that something ought to be.

"Don't be ordinary," she said softly, and let out a small, weary laugh. "As if I ever was."

Well, she thought, if Robert had left her with no instructions on how to carry out his last wish for her, he had at least taught her that you might as well face up to things instead of hiding from them. And so with only a wistful thought for the unopened bottle in the fridge downstairs, she reached for the phone again and rang for yet another cab.

---

As Alison was preparing to set off on her errand, Barb was walking very slowly back to her car, a hard-won sandwich clutched in one hand. The deli had been full of people with wet hair and rain on their coats, chattering about what they were going to have and how much time they had to have it in, and the babble of their voices and the feverish press of their bodies had made her sick and dizzy all over again. As she'd stood there getting jostled and trying to focus her thoughts long enough to choose from fifteen different sorts of sandwich fillings, she'd suddenly realised that she felt like a visitor from another planet. She wondered whether that was how Alison felt every day.

Still pondering that idea, she slid behind the wheel of the car, then carefully locked all four doors as if that could keep out anything malevolent - silly, perhaps, but she would take any scrap of security she could get. The first bite of food nearly made her gag, but then all at once her appetite came back to life and she devoured the rest of the sandwich almost without stopping to breathe, closing her eyes in relief as strength and energy flooded back into her body. With a mouthful of egg and mayo, she reached out to switch on the radio, expecting the usual muted stream of news and sport, and instead got a deafening blast of music that ripped through her head and made her still-tender eardrum vibrate at an almost unbearable pitch.

"I AM AN ANTICHRIST

AND I AM AN ANARCHIST --"

Bits of sandwich crust went flying as she scrabbled at the controls to turn the sound down, then slumped back against the seat, heart racing. How in the hell had that happened? She hadn't changed the station - she never did - if she wanted to hear music she switched over to the MP3 player - and that particular song wasn't in her collection anyway. That was Paul's music, the stuff he'd played for her edification when their parents had been at work and their youngest brother, Stephen, had been off playing football with the townies. They'd spent the very last afternoon of Paul's life that way, she sitting cross-legged on his rumpled bed and patiently sticking hundreds of safety pins into his jacket as he flipped through his records and pulled out the ones he thought she ought to hear. He'd mussed her hair and promised to take her to a Sex Pistols show when she was just a bit older, and then he'd gone away and she'd never seen him again. But that song ...

"It doesn't mean anything!" she said sharply. The belief in signs was one of the most common superstitions out there, held not only by the deeply religious, but by those who subscribed to the vague brand of "spirituality" that was so popular these days. She'd heard more than one otherwise intelligent person wax on about how their late aunt or grandfather or husband was responsible for leaving coins with significant dates in their path, sending birds and butterflies to flutter round their heads, and - yes - causing meaningful songs to pop up on the radio at appropriate times. It was all a load of old rubbish, though. Coins fell out of people's pockets all the time, birds and butterflies did things for reasons of their own, and radios were not conduits for the whims of ghosts who wanted to communicate to their loved ones through music. They just _weren't_.

Gingerly, she poked at the radio button again, and this time got the expected news. The presenter's plummy voice filled the car with a lot of boring but soothing facts about parity for pensioners, until, with a slightly shaky hand, she switched him off again and bent down to pick up the fallen remains of her lunch.

---

Ten minutes later, she parked directly across from her own house - in the middle of the afternoon, the road was nearly deserted - and sat looking at her front door for a moment, thinking about how the lock had been iced over, how she'd pulled so desperately at the knob to get out. Everything looked ordinary and quiet now, but there was a crawly feeling down her back all the same - not the cold she remembered from last night, but the sensation of someone watching her. The front windows looked like blank, open eyes. Perhaps she would go round the back instead.

Slowly but resolutely, she opened the car door and got out, trying to look as normal as possible in case the nosy old man across the way was peering through his curtains again. She wondered if his nosiness would extend to coming over to see what was the matter if he heard screams inside her house, and decided that it probably wouldn't, although he might report her for making too much noise.

_Best try to be killed quietly, then,_ she thought with a touch of dark amusement, and closed the door softly.

The gate that led into the side return was locked, but she had the key- at last her habit of carrying around the keys to every lock she owned, something for which Robert had often teased her, was paying off. The gate hadn't been opened in months and it resisted being asked to open now, but at last it complied, and then she was through it and into the back garden. It looked damp and neglected at the moment, waiting for next year's long summer evenings to come. It did not, however, look haunted, and she felt a little better, and hopeful that she would soon be telling Alison that her services were no longer required.

That feeling was all too short-lived. About halfway between the side return and the glass conservatory wall, something greyish and soft-looking lay on the ground, like a small pile of old cloth. It was not until she had nearly stepped on it that she realised what it was, and forgetting all need to be quiet, let out a scream.

"Oh God, _Alec_!"

She fell right on her knees in the soaking leaves and yellowed grass, keys and bag spilling forgotten to both sides, and scooped her cat up in an utter, abject panic. He was sodden, limp and cold to the touch, and at first she was certain that he was dead, but then he made a feeble noise and raised his head to sniff at her cheek, and she clutched him tight, full of mingled relief and terror.

"What happened to you?" she whispered into his wet fur. "What did this, _what did this_?"

"Barbara, Christ, what's the matter?" Alison's voice came from behind her, and Barb was on her feet in half an instant, with Alec cradled against her breast like a baby. Alison had an insulated paper cup in her hand and a startled, enquiring look on her face, and the very sight of her brought all the old resentment and loathing rushing back, like a tsunami sweeping away everything in its path.

"Where in the flaming hell have you been?" she spat. "You said you were coming here in the morning, and it's afternoon and you're only just arriving. My poor cat is half dead and you've been faffing around getting coffee and doing God knows what else - I thought I could trust you because Robert trusted you, but I can see I was wrong - I was -" She stumbled to a halt, not sure whether she wanted to burst into tears or strangle Alison with her bare hands, and looked down at Alec in her arms.

"He's hurt," she said helplessly. "I have to take him to the vets. What am I going to tell them?"

Alison shook her head. "Don't worry about that yet. Here, let me see him."

Barb hesitated, but then relaxed her protective embrace a bit so that Alison could look at the injured cat and gently feel of his neck and legs.

"I don't think he's broken anything," she said, glancing up at Barb, "but he's very cold, just like you were last night, and it looks as if he's been tossed around a bit." She paused. "Look, I know I said I would be here earlier, and you can be pissed off at me if you like, but can we just save it for later? You couldn't pay me to go into that house right now, not after this, and I won't let you go in either. Let's get Alec - it's Alec, isn't it? - let's get Alec sorted out, and then you can tell me all about what an awful person I am. I might even agree with you."

"Fine," Barb said, in a tone that meant it wasn't fine at all. "Do you suppose you might spare your coat so I can wrap him up?"

"All right." Alison put down her coffee cup, shrugged off her coat - a tatty old brown wool thing that looked as if it had come straight from a charity shop - and held it out. Barb laid Alec in the middle of it and folded the edges round him, leaving an opening for him to breathe, and then gathered the bundle of coat and cat into her arms and bent to collect her keys from the ground. As she straightened up, she looked at the house, and for a wild moment she thought she heard Paul's voice again; not the way it sounded when she imagined it, but like the muffled voice of a real person calling from a distance.

_Get out of here, Barbara Anne. Hurry up. I can't --_

"Let's go," she said abruptly to Alison, and the two of them left the garden.

TBC


	8. Chapter 8

You had to hand it to Barbara, Alison thought, leaning against the damp brick wall of the veterinary surgery: the woman was good at getting things done.

After a tense car ride, during which Barbara had unwillingly let Alison hold the limp and barely responsive cat in her lap, they'd arrived to find the reception area teeming with other people and their pets. Barbara had pointed Alison at a chair and, with a sort of aggressive politeness, had chivvied the girl at the desk into moving her to the top of the list. She had then taken Alec and disappeared into a back room, where she had stayed so long that Alison had got tired of all the mewling and growling and barking and had gone to wait outside despite the drizzle.

Shivering, she pulled her cardigan tighter round herself and winced as the dull ache in her lower half bloomed into full-blown pain for a moment. She had more good days than bad ones, now, but some things still aggravated the beast, and being cold was one of them. If Barbara didn't come out soon she'd have to go back inside, noisy or not. She hoped this long delay didn't mean the cat was really ill, or God forbid, dead. She didn't like to see any living thing hurt, but more than that, she was worried about how Barbara would take Alec's untimely demise. There'd already been more than enough nasty shocks for Barbara in the last twenty-four hours.

_With more still to come_, she thought grimly, wedging herself further under the scant protection of the building's overhang and trying not to think about how good a glass of wine would be right now - its dry bite at the back of her throat, its warmth spreading inside her and melting the pain away. She was nearly lost in her fantasy when Barbara came through the front door of the surgery and joined her.

"Here," Barbara said, holding Alison's old brown coat out like a used rag. "I forgot to give it back. Sorry about that."

"It's all right." Alison took the coat and wasted no time in putting it on and doing up the buttons. "What did the vet say?"

"She said he isn't hurt," Barbara said. "No broken bones, no internal or external bleeding, no head injuries, hardly even a bent whisker. But ..."

"But what?"

"He has hypothermia," Barbara said reluctantly. "She's chalking it up to lying out in the garden in the cold and damp." She stared hard at Alison as if challenging her to contradict this diagnosis. "The going theory is that a car clipped him just hard enough to stun him, and then he crawled home to recover."

"Very plausible," said Alison.

"But you don't believe it."

"Not a chance in hell," said Alison, "and you don't either, do you?"

"Why shouldn't I?" Barbara folded her arms with deliberate defiance. "It makes sense. Occam's Razor - no need to postulate unnecessary entities."

"Bollocks to Occam," said Alison. "You nearly froze to death last night, and it wasn't because you'd been lying out in the garden. You can't possibly think it's a coincidence that you found your cat in the same state this afternoon."

Barbara slumped against the wall, defeated. "No. I wish I could - oh God, I wish I could - but I can't."

"Well, then." Another stab of pain went through her and she bit her lip, grateful that Barbara was too absorbed in her own worries to notice. When she thought she could control her voice, she said, "I'll be glad to keep him for you until this mess is sorted, if you want me to. It's the least I can do, considering it's partly my fault he's ill in the first place."

"That's all right, I've already arranged for him to stay here overnight." Barbara pushed herself away from the wall and looked up at the lowering sky, then at her watch. "It's two o'clock. Where do we go from here? Back to the house?"

"Not yet," Alison said. "It isn't safe for either of us there, but especially not for you. D'you know how I knew you were in the garden when I came?"

"The side gate was open," said Barbara.

Alison shook her head. "I could feel the spirit inside watching you, watching through the windows and waiting for you to come in."

Barbara looked so stricken at this statement that Alison wondered whether she had seen or heard something that she wasn't telling. But Barbara said nothing, so she went on, "It wants something, I know that much. But I'm not going back until I know more about it and can guess what that might be, because I can tell you right now that it's got no fucking intention of telling me."

"And how -" Barbara faltered, cleared her throat and started again. "How do you propose we find out?"

"Best way to begin is at the place where all this started," Alison said.

"What, the graveyard? Now? But it takes an hour and a half at least to get there. We'll be wandering round the graves in the dark."

"Don't worry, graveyards aren't haunted at night," Alison said, and then, unable to resist the opportunity, added, "They're haunted all the time."

"How reassuring," Barbara said dryly. "And I wasn't thinking about that, I was thinking about tripping over someone's gravestone and breaking my ankle, or getting shut in and having to spend the night there. Why on earth can't we go in the morning?"

"Every day you wait is another day your life's on hold," Alison pointed out. "It isn't a problem for me - I've got all the time in the world. But you've got work and appointments and people who will want to know where you are if you don't turn up for them, and the sooner we get to the bottom of this, the sooner you can go back to all that. Unless of course you want it to get around the university that you're consorting with a medium because you think you've seen a ghost. You know how well that went over for Robert."

"Yes, well, whose fault was that?" Barbara snapped, and then immediately checked herself. "No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. I just - I'm a bit on edge."

"Only a bit?" asked Alison with a crooked smile. "Look, Barbara, I never meant for Robert to come to any sort of harm. He did a lot for me, more than you know, and all I ever wanted to do was help him find some peace. Maybe I didn't always go about it the right way, but does anyone?" She paused. "Did you?"

Right away she saw that she'd hit a tender spot, that this was something that had been troubling Barbara for a long time now. Barbara's dark eyes welled up with tears, and for a moment she seemed to be trembling on the verge of something - a confession perhaps, or a plea for forgiveness. But then she turned away, the chill wind blowing her hair across her face so Alison couldn't see her expression, and when she turned back the moment had passed.

"Come on," Alison said more gently. "We've got a long way to go before dark."

---

Except for slip roads and junctions, Barb drove with her foot right down most of the way, trying desperately to outrun both traffic and nightfall. She hadn't wanted to admit to Alison that the idea of being in the graveyard after dark frightened her, but it did. As a teenager she'd sneaked in sometimes with friends at the weekends, to drink cheap alcohol and behave badly -- nowhere near Paul's grave, of course, she hadn't been _that_ irreverent. Now she wondered how she'd ever had the nerve.

She cast a sideways glance at Alison, who was leaning against the window with her eyes shut, either sleeping or ignoring her. Did Alison know what she was doing? Robert had believed in her, but Robert was gone. Robert was dead. Paul was dead. Perhaps she would be dead soon too. Well, she'd wanted to do empirical research, and there was nothing more empirical than that.

"Just drive," she muttered to herself. The sound woke Alison, who sat up blinking and yawning, with the heavy black makeup around her eyes all smudged. She looked like an aging version of Nancy Spungen after a hard night out, Barb thought rather uncharitably.

"Are we there yet?"

"About half way."

"Could we have some music?" Alison asked, indicating the MP3 player plugged into its access point.

"I'd rather not," said Barb, remembering what had happened last time she had switched on the radio. She supposed she ought to tell Alison about that, but she really didn't want to.

Alison gave her an odd, rather irritated look, said "All right, then," and went back to her nap.

Barb looked at the speedometer, decided she could go a bit faster, and pushed the pedal even closer to the floor. The BMW's engine leapt to the challenge eagerly, and the needle rose to just above 150 km/h and stayed there. It felt more like flying low than driving. Under other circumstances, she thought she might have enjoyed it.

Through a combination of illegal speed and a break in the rain, they arrived early enough to miss the worst of the Friday-afternoon traffic, most of which was heading out of the city centre anyway. Still, it was closer to four than three when Barb pushed open the gate, shuddering at the familiar shriek of the hinges, and stood aside to let Alison into the graveyard.

"All right, this is it, what do you want to see?" She realised she was shaking, either from the cold or from nerves, and tried to stop, but couldn't. If only she'd grabbed her coat when Alison sent her outside last night - but then, she'd had no idea she wouldn't be going back in again. A sudden, intense wave of yearning for her own house swept over her, for her furniture and books and photographs, for her clothes and her bed and her fluffy blue dressing gown and her claw-footed bath. Oh, she wanted to go _home_.

"Let's see the unmarked grave first," Alison said.

"I knew you'd say that," Barb said unhappily. "This way."

---

It wasn't much to look at, Alison thought, but there was certainly something there - the same vague feeling of darkness and disturbance she had sensed in Barbara's house, as if something unpleasant had recently passed by. She knelt, damp earth soaking both knees of her jeans, and brushed wet, rotting leaves away from the sunken mound. Half-bare tree branches rustled overhead, tossed about by the wind.

"Ugh," she said, and pulled a face. "Is that the smell you meant?"

"Yes -- oh God --" Barbara made an involuntary gagging noise, and Alison, still on her knees, swivelled round to see that Barbara's face had gone sickly white.

"What?"

"That's what made me throw up last night," Barbara said, as if confessing to a shameful personal failure.

"Are you going to be all right?"

Barbara swallowed hard and took an uncertain step back from the grave, then seemed to rally. "I think so. It isn't as strong as before -- you can't imagine what it was like inside the house, before you came."

"If it was worse than this, I don't want to. Christ, what a stink." Holding her breath, Alison scraped the rest of the leaves to one side and then stood up to join Barbara at a distance. Pain stirred in her belly again, but settled down without getting any worse.

"That's your flower, isn't it?"

Barbara nodded, her eyes fixed on the battered long-stemmed rose Alison had indicated. "It's from the bouquet I brought for Paul. I hope his haven't fallen to bits like that -- look, nearly all the petals are off, and it's turning black already. From the rain last night, I suppose."

"Hmmm," Alison said. "What exactly did you do when you put it down?"

"Nothing, I swear. I just laid it at the base of the stone and then I left."

"Did you say anything?"

"Er ..." Barbara seemed to search her memory. "I think I said 'Here you are,' or something like that, and then I said I had to go because it was getting late. I was just talking to myself really."

"I know," Alison said. She wiped her hands on her legs, leaving swaths of earth and leaf slime behind, and looked round at the rest of the graveyard. Ranks of monuments and stones marched off in three directions, some crumbling, some leaning at crazy angles. A sorrowful angel peered out accusingly from behind shrubbery that had grown long creepers across its face. At a distance, the grey bulk of the church reared up against the overcast sky, and near its wall, she saw the pale shape of a young woman's spirit wandering. The spirit turned and looked at her with a glimmer of hopeful recognition, but she ignored it.

"This grave's awfully far from all the others," she said. "Look, you can see the line where they stop."

Barbara nodded. "I remember asking my mother about it, years and years ago. She thought this grave might have been outside the churchyard, once, and then the fence had been built round it later."

"They buried murderers outside consecrated ground," said Alison.

"They buried stillborn babies outside consecrated ground too," said Barbara. "We can't make assumptions." She shivered. "It's getting late. What else?"

"Will you show me where your brother is?"

Barbara led the way there, and Alison looked down at the simple stone, feeling a pang of sorrow at the short distance between the birth and death dates.

"3 November 1957 to 29 December 1976," she read aloud. "So yesterday wasn't really his birthday, then."

"No, today," Barbara said. "I came early because I knew I wouldn't have time later - I had meetings scheduled all afternoon. Or I did have, anyway. But I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"That's because you aren't a good Catholic girl like me," said Alison wryly. "Yesterday was All Souls Day. And even if you don't observe it, you sat through RE at school like everyone else, so you must know what it's for."

"To offer prayers for the faithful departed and speed up their translation to Heaven," Barbara said, in the tones of someone quoting from a long-ago lesson.

"That's right. But also - and I'm surprised you haven't thought of this already, Miss Doctor of Psychology - "

"- it's when people believe the souls of the dead come back to visit the earth," Barbara finished. "Oh God, and now you're going to tell me that it isn't just a superstition, aren't you?"

"Yes and no," said Alison. "The souls of the dead who have crossed over don't come back. They can't. But the unquiet souls, the earthbound ones - they go looking for their families. And if they can't find them, they try to talk to anyone who will listen."

"People like you, you mean," Barbara said.

Alison nodded and stuffed her hands into her coat pockets. "After I started seeing spirits, I nearly wore my knees out during All Souls Mass, praying for everyone who had died during the year. There would always be a few of them in the church, and they'd come right up to me, close enough to touch, and look at me so sadly. I'd close my eyes and pray extra hard for them to go to Heaven and leave me alone, but they never would. My Aunty Vi told me not to ignore them, that all they wanted was to be seen, but it was a long time before I could give them what they needed."

"It sounds horrible." Barbara's voice was unexpectedly soft and sympathetic, and Alison wondered for a moment whether it was real compassion or some sort of therapist's technique to win her confidence. She was surprised to discover how much she wanted it to be the former rather than the latter.

"Funerals are worse," she said, shrugging. "It's harder when it's someone you know."

"Funerals?" Barbara looked appalled. "People really do come to their own funerals?"

"Sometimes," Alison said.

"Did - did Robert?"

"No," Alison said at once, understanding the fear behind the question. "No, he crossed over. I saw it happen. You don't ever need to worry about him, Barbara, all right? Nothing can hurt him now. He's safe."

Tears prickled at her eyes, and she blinked fiercely, hoping Barbara wouldn't see them; it didn't do to cry while explaining that everything was all right. But the image of Robert walking into that blinding light, his arm round his little boy's shoulders, was already there in her mind, and she was glad when Barbara sat down on her brother's gravestone and put her face in her hands.

"I don't know how not to worry about him," Barbara said through her fingers. "I've been worrying about him for fifteen years. I worried when he was writing his thesis, I worried after Josh - after Josh -" She drew a trembling breath. "I worried when he and Jude separated and I worried when he got ill. I was nearly ill myself then -- I couldn't eat or sleep or think about anything but looking for something that could save him, and he wouldn't _listen_ to me, he wouldn't _try_."

"Nothing could have saved him," Alison said. She pulled Barbara's hands away from her face, forcing her to make eye contact. "Listen to me. I tried too - I offered my own life for his - but it was his time to go, and no one could stop it."

"It wasn't meant to be that way," Barbara said bitterly. "He was meant to have a great life. I was going to make sure he did." Her hand closed tight on the edge of the gravestone, and Alison began to realise what was at work here.

"You mean, because your brother didn't," she said, and Barbara nodded, snuffling and wiping her eyes on her jumper sleeve.

"When I met Robert, he was about the same age Paul had been when he died," she said, "and they were so much the same - so bright and curious and passionate about everything - and I thought, I thought that I could look after him, that I could protect him and guide him and help him to have the life Paul hadn't had. I was the eldest this time, you see. It was my responsibility."

"Barbara, it wasn't."

"Yes, it was," said Barbara, and stood up again with an air of finality. "This isn't the time or place to talk about it. We haven't got more than a quarter-hour before it's too dark to see, so unless you have a torch in your pocket, we've got to finish our business and go."

"All right, let's have one more look at the other stone, and then we'll leave," Alison said.

They walked back in the dying light, and Alison borrowed Barbara's phone to snap a few photos of the old grave, now looking raw and ugly and somehow naked with its leaf covering shoveled away. She handed the phone back, and Barbara stuffed it into her trouser pocket, then squatted beside the stone.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm taking my rose back," Barbara said. "I wish I hadn't left it in the first place. I - hang on a minute." A sharp note of surprise and excitement came into her voice, startling Alison.

"What?"

"Come and look at this. There's a bit of carving on this stone after all. It's nearly worn to nothing, but if you look very closely you can see part of a line here, and another one here."

Alison crouched next to her, muddy earth squelching under her shoes, and squinted. "You're right. It looks like a T, or maybe a J."

"There's more than that," Barbara said. The fingertips of her right hand slid across the stone, grazing it as if she were reading Braille. "It's too faint to see, but I can feel it."

"If we had a pencil and paper we could try rubbing it over." Alison caught hold of Barbara's free wrist and turned it to see the face of her watch. "It's after four now, it'll be dark any minute, we'll never be able to find a shop and get back in time."

"Wait here," Barbara said, and all but ran toward the gate. In a few minutes she came panting back with a large sheet of white paper fluttering in one hand and a small, flat box clutched in the other.

"It's artists' charcoal," she said to Alison's inquiring look. "I did a course last summer - I'm writing a new book and thought I would do some sketches for it. I gave up when I realised I was awful at sketching, but I still have all the supplies in the car boot." She looked down. "We should clean the stone off a bit if we can, it's wet and probably filthy too."

They both knelt, ignoring the damp and the lingering smell, and scrubbed at the stone with their bare hands and a corner of Alison's coat. After a moment Barbara said, "That's the best we can do - here, hold the paper flat against the stone for me. Use both your hands. Make it tight." She pulled a stick of charcoal out of the box, broke it in her hurry, swore, and threw the pieces away before taking another stick.

"Hurry, the light's going," Alison urged.

"I can see that," Barbara said. She was nearly invisible in the gathering dusk now; Alison could just see the pale blur of her hand at the end of its dark sleeve, moving steadily back and forth across the paper. "I'm going as fast as I can. I can't tell what I'm getting, though - we may have to come back tomorrow after all. I wish it were a smoother surface. Oh God, I feel sick - that smell -"

"Here, let me have a go -"

"No, it's all right." Coughing, Barbara stood up and backed away from the grave, shaking the paper to dislodge loose flecks of charcoal. "I think that's all there was, and it's dark now anyway." She was right, Alison realised; the last streaks of grey had gone from the horizon, and the only light now came from the road outside the gate.

"Shit," she said. "I didn't think it would be _this_ dark."

"I told you," said Barbara. "We used to climb over the fence, years ago. It was even blacker then. Here -" She flipped open her phone, its blue light casting a hideous illumination across her face. "It's not much, but it's better than nothing. Please can we go now, before I'm sick again, and find a place where we can see what we have here?"

"Of course," Alison said.


	9. Chapter 9

They had barely shut the car doors when the skies opened up again and rain bucketed down, drumming on the roof and forming silvery sheets on the windows. Alison pulled the charcoal rubbing out from under her coat, where she'd tucked it for safety's sake, and peered at it in the glow of the LED map light.

"It's still too dark, I can't make anything out," she said.

Barb stared through the windscreen at the deluge. Behind them, the graveyard loomed black and wet and wild, and she longed to get away from it and everything it represented, but the rain and the long road ahead felt like an impassable barrier. A bubble of panic began to form inside her, swelling fast and threatening to cut off her breath. She clung to the wheel and willed it away.

"I can't drive home in this," she managed to say. "Actually, I don't think I can drive home at all -- not tonight anyway. I'd crash and kill us both. We'll need to find someplace near here to stay." She imagined turning up on her seventy-nine-year-old mother's doorstep with Alison in tow, explaining that they were investigating something to do with Paul -- oh God, no, absolutely not.

"It'll have to be a hotel," she added. "Don't bother about the cost, I'll pay for it."

"I don't --" Alison began, but Barb cut her off.

"I know people usually give you money for helping them," she said. "You haven't asked me for anything because of Robert, and I appreciate that, I really do, but the least I can do is cover your expenses whilst we're away. It's business travel. It's perfectly acceptable."

"Okay," Alison said after a long pause.

"Good, that's settled then," Barb said, hugely relieved at this alternative plan of escape. Hotels were civilised and predictable and safe, not to mention full of ordinary, boring people who knew nothing about spirits. "Only we've got to find a shopping centre first. I slept in these clothes last night and they're starting to feel manky, and I don't think I can face another day without a toothbrush. And I'm going to buy everything for you that I buy for myself, so don't argue."

"Okay," Alison said again, and Barb started the car.

What followed was quite possibly the least enjoyable shopping trip she'd ever experienced: instead of the leisurely browsing that was her usual habit, she slunk into Debenhams, grabbed several pieces of more-or-less matching clothing and lingerie in her size, found a warm coat to go on top, heaped it all up with Alison's things and paid without even noticing the total. They repeated this performance at a chemist, and twenty minutes after they'd begun, were back in the car and searching for a hotel. The first one with a room available was a Novotel, and the staff in its smart red-and-black foyer looked oddly at a pair of bedraggled women checking in with four plastic carrier bags, a handbag and a laptop case instead of luggage, but Barb handed over her credit card as if this were business as usual, and was duly given an electronic key card in exchange. It wasn't until they were in the lift that she began to feel uncomfortable. There was a weird, embarrassing intimacy to the idea of sharing a hotel room with Alison that there hadn't been to sleeping on her sofa the night before, and the feeling only got stronger as they walked down the corridor looking for the right number.

Wishing she'd just splashed out on individual rooms, she swiped the key card and opened the door to reveal yet more red and black -- apparently the hotel's decorator had been fond of those colours. Everything was terribly modern, from the sleek ebony desk to the hard, red faux-leather armchairs to the recessed lighting to the flat-screen television. Against that backdrop, Alison looked like a time traveller from another decade, her charity-shop clothes all crumpled from the long car ride and her hair still damp with rain.

"Not too shabby," Alison said, glancing around.

"No, not at all." Barb let the door swing shut behind her and dropped her things on the nearest bed. An awkward silence descended.

"Right then, where's that rubbing?" she asked, hoping to fill it.

Alison sat down on the other bed and pulled off her shoes, grimacing at their coating of graveyard soil. "There's no rush now, we're here for the night. Have you even eaten anything today?"

"Not much," said Barb, thinking of her interrupted lunch and wondering again if she ought to mention the radio's strange behaviour to Alison - but surely that had just been a coincidence. Even if _some_ unexplained phenomena were down to ghosts, that didn't mean _all_ of them were, did it? No, it didn't.

"Well, neither have I, so we may as well get some food and make ourselves comfortable before we get stuck into it." Alison tucked her stocking feet up underneath her. "As long as you're paying, I fancy a nice, thick steak and some seventy-year-old brandy."

"What!"

"Only joking, a sandwich and a cup of tea will be fine," said Alison, laughing. "Just because I see spirits doesn't mean I haven't got a sense of humour, Barbara. And I'll bet you've got one too, buried somewhere underneath all that psychology in your head. You don't let it out often, but it's there. I've seen it."

Barb gazed down at her, looking waiflike and vulnerable and strangely small in her awful old coat, and abruptly felt much more at ease. In all the angst and drama of the day, she had somehow forgot that Alison was just a person too, a person with her own needs and quirks and desires, who laughed and cried and occasionally cracked a joke. Spending a night in a hotel with a medium was one thing. Spending the same night with a real woman was a much less disturbing prospect.

"You know, people usually only call me Barbara when they're cross with me," she said. "All my friends call me Barb. Maybe you should too."

"Maybe I will," said Alison, and smiled.

---

With the worst of the awkwardness out of the way, they got down to business quickly. Whilst Alison was on the phone to room service, Barb unlocked the mini-bar, outrageous prices be damned, and helped herself to all the wine it contained -- two half-bottles each of red and white, plus a quarter magnum of real champagne. Alison got a queer look on her face when she saw the bottles, but poured herself a very restrained glassful of the red and then pushed the rest back across the desk to Barb, who had already drained her first glass and was halfway down a second.

"They said half an hour," Alison remarked. "We could at least have a look at the rubbing before then."

Barb finished her wine and decided she ought to wait for food before having any more. Under ordinary circumstances, she could drink a lot with very little effect -- it was one of the advantages of her height -- but this was hitting her on a mostly empty stomach and not much sleep, and she was already beginning to feel a bit swimmy in the head. Much as she would have liked to get thoroughly sozzled, it wasn't the ideal state for doing research.

"All right, let's see it," she said. Alison fetched the rolled-up sheet of paper from her bed, and together they spread it out on the desk, weighing the stubbornly curling corners down with full and empty bottles.

"Well, it's letters," Barb said. She switched on the desk lamp and angled it to throw a bright wedge of light across the rubbing. "Several of them, it looks like."

"Budge up, I can't see," said Alison, dragging over one of the red armchairs and squeezing it in beside her. "Where?"

"Right here." Barb pointed at the charcoal-smudged paper with an equally smudged finger. "This one we thought was a T or J -- it's a J. There's a huge space after it though; I missed something, or else it's just been worn away over time."

Alison leant over Barb's left arm to get a better look. "Here's another one, though. An N?"

"I don't know," Barb said. "See if there's anything to write with in that desk drawer." Alison pulled the drawer open, found a pad of paper and a biro with the hotel's emblem on it, and handed both of them over.

"Thanks," Barb said absently. On the top sheet of paper, she wrote "J___N(?)," and then turned her attention back to the rubbing. It was terribly hard to read -- she'd covered nearly the entire paper with big, sweeping strokes, but in the dark, she hadn't been able to tell where to fill in details, if the details had been there at all. Then, just to add another layer of difficulty, there were random whorls and lines and black gouges where the surface of the stone underneath had been uneven. But frustrating as it was, the vagueness was also exciting. Here, finally, was something concrete she could do, a puzzle that she knew she was equipped to work out. The information was there in front of her; all she had to do was put it together and draw the correct conclusions.

_Paul said I was the clever one. I hope he was right_, she thought, and realised that she was thinking of the mental conversation she'd had with Paul earlier as if it had been real. It had certainly felt real - but as she had said to Robert once, feeling something was real didn't make it so. But at the same time, she hadn't heard Paul's voice in more than thirty years; he'd died before the advent of video cameras and handheld recorders, before voicemail and .wav files and all the other things people took for granted now. She should not have been able to reproduce the exact timbre of his speech so accurately in her mind's ear. In fact, she couldn't do it now; when she tried to imagine him speaking - _All right, Barbara Anne_ - it was only her idea of what he had sounded like, nothing more. She hadn't heard that other voice, the true, warm, genuine voice, since just before she'd left the garden with Alec in her arms.

"That'll be the food," Alison said suddenly beside her, and got up to open the door. Shaken, Barb reached for the nearest wine bottle and topped her glass off again as Alison uncovered dishes and shook out serviettes.

"Come on," Alison said, waving half a sandwich at her, "I'm starving, so you'd best tuck in before I get at yours too."

"Yes, all right." Barb left the rubbing behind, after making certain that nothing could spill on it, and went to collect her plate. After that it got very quiet for a few minutes as they ate, Alison with a good appetite, Barb dutifully and a bit mechanically.

"Alison?" She played with a forkful of chicken.

"Mmm, what?"

"What is it like when you see spirits?"

Alison shrugged and swallowed. "It's like seeing living people, only not. They're as solid to me as you are; I can touch them the way I would touch you; but they're half a step removed from the world you live in. It's as if we meet someplace that isn't quite here or there, and everything else falls away, and it's just them and me."

"And when they talk to you, when they communicate with you, is it --" She searched for the right word. "Is it audible?"

"You want to know if I hear voices," Alison said, amused. "Why not just ask me? Robert did."

"Well, do you?" asked Barb. She felt a hot flush creeping up her neck toward her face, and stuffed the piece of chicken into her mouth to distract herself from it.

"It depends on the person," Alison said. "Some of them are very strong and very motivated, and they can speak so I can hear them, just like anyone else. Others communicate through thoughts and images, all in a muddle; they're harder to understand. The spirit in your house won't speak to me at all; the only thing I get from it is its feelings, and they aren't nice ones. But most of them aren't like that." She cocked her head at Barb. "Why do you ask?"

"I was just curious," Barb said, and turned her attention back to her food before Alison could pursue that line of questioning any further.

As soon as they'd finished eating and stacked the dishes on the tray, Barb retrieved her laptop from its case and set it up beside the flattened-out rubbing, then sat down to work again. It was going to take more than two letters and a lot of charcoal smears to make any sense of this, she thought, bringing up a search engine and trying a few different combinations of keywords.

"What's going on?" Alison asked, appearing at Barb's elbow again with something held in a cupped palm.

"There aren't any dates, but I thought we might be able to find a site to help us narrow it down by the style of lettering," Barb said. "I don't know anything about gravestones really; I've always been more interested in living people than dead ones."

Alison put her hand to her mouth, then gulped the last of the wine in her glass, and Barb realised she'd just taken some sort of tablets. A line from Robert's book popped into her head - _Six years after the accident, Alison Mundy still lives with both mental and physical pain_ - and she felt a sudden spasm of guilt and pity, like a hand squeezing her heart. She drew a breath to scold that Alison should have said if she wasn't well, but Alison was already leaning over her shoulder to reach the laptop's keyboard.

"Here, this is a good one." She caught a glimpse of Barb's face and smiled. "Don't look so surprised. Psychology's your speciality. Graveyards are mine."

"Right," Barb said, recovering. "Well. Let's see if we can make out the rest of these letters, and then we'll compare them. Here, this one looks like either an O or a C."

"I think it's a C," Alison said. "You see, there's a little stroke at the end of the top curve, a what-do-you-call-it -"

"A serif," Barb said. "Good. So a C, then a space, and then these two letters here are Ls. Then another space, and then an R." She turned back to the laptop and scrolled down, reading. "They're all capital letters, so according to this the stone would most likely be seventeenth century or earlier. Of course you'd need an expert to date it precisely, but I don't suppose this is an exact science." After the J__N(?) notation on the pad, she wrote C_LL__R, then drew a box round the entire sequence of letters.

"J, N, C, L, L, R," Alison mused. "A name?"

"Very likely." Barb touched the rubbing with a fingertip, being careful not to smudge it any more than it already was. "The space between the N and the C is larger than any of the others. Suppose those two letters are part of a Christian name, and the others are a surname?"

"J and N sounds like John," Alison said, sitting down in the red armchair again, "but C, L, L, R could be all sorts of things. How can we find out?"

"Hang on." Barb pecked out an address and brought up a new page with a search box. "If we enter the letters we've got with dashes for the ones we haven't -"

"Collier," Alison read off the screen. "John Collier?"

"Or Jean, or Joan," Barbara said. "Don't forget, it could be a woman."

Alison shook her head. "It's not a woman. It feels male, at least as far as it feels human at all."

The last few words sent a horrid shiver down Barb's spine. She wanted to ask Alison what she meant by that, but she was afraid she already knew. The presence that had chilled her blood and sent her running out into the night had been overwhelmingly strong, but it hadn't felt like a person. In the course of her career she'd interviewed countless men and women who had murdered their wives and husbands and children, who had dismembered random victims and done dreadful things with the pieces, who had thought they were holy warriors and demons of vengeance. Most of them had sickened her, many of them had frightened her, but all of them had been recognisable as human beings. The thing in her house hadn't.

"God," she said thickly, and poured herself another glass of wine.

"You know what I mean, don't you?"

Barb nodded, tipped the glass up and drank it all in three long swallows. "I know exactly what you mean. What can we do?"

"Find out as much more as we can," Alison said, "then go back and confront him. Knowing who he is - was - might shock him into saying something."

Barb closed her eyes for a moment and let out a long, slow breath. "All right. Here, have some of this, please. I'm being greedy."

Alison eyed her own empty glass, then the fresh, unopened bottle Barb had picked up, and appeared to be weighing the decision in her mind.

"Just one more," she said.

---

"I've got a question for you now," Alison said some time later. The red armchair didn't invite curling up, and in fact was hard to sit in at all without slipping off, but she had managed to wedge herself into a corner of it and dangle her feet over the other side.

"Hmm?" said Barb from her bed, where she had retreated with the laptop and the champagne to begin searching for the mysterious John Collier; the other four half-bottles, all empty now, were still doing their duty as paperweights on the desk. She'd been yawning nonstop for the last ten minutes: the alcohol and the food and the long, strange day were all catching up to her, and her eyelids felt heavy and gritty.

"What do you believe about evil?"

Barb looked up from the screen and met Alison's eyes. They were wide and clear and very solemn, and she wondered where Alison might be going with this.

"In the cosmological sense, or as an explanation for human actions?"

"Both."

"Well, for the latter, we teach that aberrant behaviour is often the result of organic illness - an injury, or a chemical imbalance, or a - " She started to say _a brain tumour_, but caught herself just in time. "Or a disease of the brain. And then there are environmental factors, such as abuse and neglect, that can cause personality disorders. All these things can produce the sorts of behaviour that we perceive as evil, but it isn't; it's illness."

"And when it isn't illness?"

Barb sighed and closed the laptop's lid. "Then there are the Ian Garlands of the world - people who are _not_ mentally ill, who have no discernable organic disease, who know the things they do are unacceptable by any society's standards, and choose to do them anyway for the pleasure of it." She saw Alison about to speak and held up a hand to stop her. "Yes, there was the Rat Man, and I suppose given everything that's happened to me in the last day and night, I have to accept the possibility that Garland was telling the truth about him. But that being said, Garland still made the choice to do what the Rat Man told him to do. He was mentally competent. He could have said no, but he didn't; he wanted to do those things. He enjoyed them. He would have done the same to you or I if he'd had the chance. If evil exists, that's it."

Alison unfolded herself from the armchair and stood up. "So you're saying that evil is a conscious decision, not a force of nature."

"I don't see what else it can be," Barb said, picking up the champagne bottle and pouring the last bit into her glass, where it sent up a few token bubbles before going flat. "I don't believe in God or the Devil, not really, so all that's left are people and the choices they make." She drank the champagne and yawned again. "I suppose now you're going to tell me that God and the Devil come to your house for tea every Thursday."

"No, afraid not," Alison said. She walked round and sat down in the vacant spot next to Barb, the bed creaking and springing slightly under her weight. "But I do believe that evil exists, and that good does too. And that's important."

"Why?" asked Barb, who was now so drowsy that she could barely keep her eyes open. It felt like drowning in treacle, all thick and sticky, and every time she went under, she missed part of what Alison was saying.

"... and can help," Alison said as she surfaced again. Alison's fair hair was a halo of gold in the lamplight. Were they talking about angels? She didn't believe in those either. She started to tell Alison so, but before she could finish, she fell asleep.


	10. Chapter 10

Barb woke up hung over and feeling as if she hadn't really slept at all. Before she was completely conscious, she sensed the warmth and weight of an unfamiliar body near her and bolted upright with a stomach-dropping sense of dread - what had she been doing, and with whom? Then she saw Alison curled up beside her, sound asleep, still wearing the old jeans and cardigan she'd had on the night before. Rainy grey light filtered through the gaps in the hotel curtains. The other bed stood untouched, its puffy white duvet smooth and pristine.

_Oh thank goodness_. Barb subsided onto her pillow and waited with eyes closed for her heart to stop racing. She'd forgot entirely where she was for a moment. She'd been dreaming about Paul; they'd been walking in her garden on a bleak winter's day, and he'd been explaining how she could make her roses blossom whenever she liked. She'd said _It can't be that easy_, and he'd laughed and said _It is, though_, and just then all the bare rose bushes had burst into bloom at once, filling the air with drifting pink petals and heady, voluptuous scent. It made her giddy just to think about it, or perhaps that was the hangover.

Alison murmured something in her sleep and rolled onto her other side, and taking this as an opportunity to get up without disturbing her, Barb eased her legs off the side of the bed and sat there for a moment, assessing her condition. Head, a bit sore; stomach, not bad; overall condition, wobbly but serviceable. All right. To the bathroom. Slowly.

Her face in the bathroom mirror was pale, with bruised-looking circles under the eyes, and her hair was in a terrible state: after all the repeated wetting and drying out, it had frizzed so thoroughly she couldn't even pull her fingers through it. But she was upright and mobile and functioning, and considering what the last two days had been like, she couldn't ask for much more than that.

As she began peeling off her grubby, slept-in clothes, she wondered whether Alison would be in any better state when she woke up, and then, abruptly, why Alison had been sleeping in her bed in the first place. She'd been so relieved not to find a stranger there, the result of some awful lapse in judgment on her part, that she hadn't thought about it until now. Alison had been wide-awake when they'd been talking about good and evil, she was sure of it, so how had Alison ended up where she was? Frowning, she turned on the shower and got in, hoping it would all make more sense afterward.

---

On the other side of the bathroom door, Alison lay staring up at the blank hotel ceiling. She had drunk more than she'd meant to the previous night, certainly more than her self-imposed programme of restraint called for, but nowhere near enough to cause any ill effects. She wasn't happy about the slip, though. For her, it would always be a perilously short distance from having an extra glass or two with a friend to sitting at her window all afternoon, watching the world go by as she pissed her life away one sip at a time.

_Sorry, Robert_, she thought. _I'll do better next time, I swear._

Before she could motivate herself to get up, Barbara emerged from the bathroom, dressed in loose dark trousers and a long-sleeved brown top, and clearly having made an attempt to hide some of the previous day's excesses with make-up. She spotted Alison and came to a sudden halt in the doorway.

"Oh, you're awake."

Alison raised her eyebrows. "Good morning to you too."

It was dim in the room, but even through the gloom she could see Barbara go red. "Sorry. Good morning. Did you sleep well?"

"Fantastic," Alison said. "You?"

"Fine, thanks," said Barbara, giving her a strange look. Alison could see the question burning in her mind - _but why were we doing it together?_ - and decided to let her wonder about that for a bit. The truth was that when Barbara had fallen asleep in the midst of their conversation, she'd realised that she was exhausted as well, and had lain down right where she was, not wanting to bother with getting undressed and crawling into the other bed. Barbara was much warmer and softer than she looked, and it had been rather nice to have a sleeping companion for a change; except for a single regrettable experience three years ago, she hadn't shared a bed with anyone for any reason in a long time. The closest she had come was the night Robert had stayed with her in Sandra Petch's flat.

Barbara held out a moment longer, but when no explanation was forthcoming, let it go and went to peer into the mirror above the room's glossy black chest of drawers.

"Anyway, I've been thinking," she said, gathering her hair up tidily at the back. "You wanted to do research, and I think we'll have better luck here than in Bristol -- the local university will have heaps of data on the town's history, including burial records if there are any." She twisted an elastic round the ponytail she'd made and smoothed down a few stray curling wisps at the sides. "As it happens, I know someone there who should be able to get us access to anything we need."

"Who?" Alison asked, sitting up.

"Just an old friend," Barbara said.

---

The university's library was a modern, glass-fronted building set in a sweeping expanse of grass, which Alison thought would likely be full of lounging people in nice weather. On this soggy Saturday morning, it was mostly empty under the heavily clouded sky, with only a few intrepid students making their way toward the library doors, and one older man who was waiting to greet them.

"Barb!"

"Hello, Neil," Barbara said, stretching up to put a kiss on his cheek. Neil was very tall and very thin, with brown hair greying at the temples and a short, neatly kept beard. He had on a smart shirt and tie under a navy mac, and he was smiling with real pleasure, obviously glad to see Barbara and anyone else she might have brought along.

"You should have said you were coming, we would have had you round for dinner," he said, returning her kiss. "Although it's a bit thick with bunnies at home just now. The girls each got rabbits last summer, and we didn't find out until later that they were a male and a female instead of two males. You can't imagine what a mess eight rabbits make in the house."

"Probably not," said Barbara. "You could have given some of them away, couldn't you?"

"Not without a pair of hysterical thirteen-year-olds making a scene," said Neil. "I'd rather live with the rabbits." He looked kindly and rather quizzically down at Alison. "I don't think we've met, have we?"

"Oh, sorry," Barbara said. "Alison Mundy, this is Neil Allingham, he's vice-chancellor for research at this university, as well as a professor of psychology specialising in cognitive theory. Neil, this is Alison, she's -- she's a friend."

"How do you do," said Alison, wondering whether, if they were going to be comparing qualifications, she ought to add 'Bachelor of Nursing (Hons)' on to Barbara's description of her. She put out her hand, and Neil shook it and said how nice it was to meet her.

"So you're doing a bit of genealogical research, then?" he asked. Alison, who had been in the shower when Barbara phoned to arrange this meeting, looked at her for help.

"Yes," Barbara said smoothly. "I've been helping Alison trace some of her family, and it turns out she has a few ancestors here, seventeenth century we think, or possibly before. She wanted to have a look round the graveyard, and as my brother's buried there too, I thought I would come along. We found some interesting stones, and now here we are to learn more about them."

"Of course," Neil said. "Well, the printed materials in the library are open to visitors, and I've arranged for you to have access to all the electronic records as well; the systems work the same way the ones at Bristol do, so you should have no trouble. You can use my login for anything restricted, and my staff card if you need to make photocopies." He handed a stiff plastic card and a slip of paper over to Barbara, who tucked them into the pocket of her new coat. "I'll be away part of the day - the girls are going ice-skating and Will has a birthday party - but I should be back by two. If you finish before then, just pop the card under my office door. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"I think you've covered it all pretty thoroughly," said Barbara, smiling. "Now go enjoy your skating and birthdays; we'll just get on with things here, won't we, Alison?"

"Yes, thanks very much," said Alison, and with a little wave, Neil departed, head down against the rain that had just started again.

"He's quite nice," Alison said, watching him go. "How do you know each other?"

"We used to be married," Barbara said.

"What? Really?" Alison was stunned. Barbara seemed so self-contained, living alone in her magazine-perfect house with only the cat for company, that she couldn't imagine her ever having been married to anyone. She tried to picture Barbara and Neil doing married sorts of things - having breakfast together, watching the news, hanging up curtains, making love - but it gave her a very odd feeling, so she stopped.

"Yes, really," Barbara said. "Not for very long, though. Postgraduate students shouldn't be allowed to marry each other; it never lasts. He's been with someone else for fifteen years now - they've got twin daughters and a little boy. I get cards every Christmas with their photos in."

"Sorry about that," said Alison, thinking of her own nightmare of a marriage and divorce. Christmas cards and dinner invitations seemed very civilised in comparison. She hadn't seen her former husband in a long time, but she was quite sure he would still rather greet her by blacking her eye than kissing her cheek.

Barbara shrugged. "It's for the best. We get on wonderfully now that we only see each other once every few years. When we lived together I wanted to throttle him at least twice a week." She looked at her watch. "Anyway, it's all ancient history. And speaking of history, you and I have got a lot to do. Come on."

---

After a morning and early afternoon spent in the comforting familiarity of the library, Barb felt calmer than she had done since Thursday, before this whole mad dream had begun. They had stopped on the way to the university and bought notepads and pencils and highlighters, and she had arranged all these things on a table in an out-of-the-way corner, along with her laptop and the rubbing they had made at the graveyard, to create a little oasis of reason and order. It was probably the academic version of an expecting mother's nesting instinct, she thought wryly, but it had helped. If only the paracetamol she'd taken would do something about her headache, everything would be perfect.

Alison, for her part, had been working steadily away, going through the books they had pulled from the shelves. Barb hadn't been sure how much help she could expect from Alison, but she'd been pleasantly surprised to find that Alison was quite a competent researcher, patient and focused. She'd been sat in her chair for hours, one foot tucked up underneath her and the other bent round the chair's leg, turning pages and occasionally noting the title of another book to check. Meanwhile, Barb had been logged onto the university's network with Neil's password, combing through databases and scanned documents and trying not to think too much about why she was doing it. The research was a pleasant challenge, but once they found what they were looking for, they were going to have to do something with the information, and that would not be pleasant at all. It was easy, in this safe and isolated place, to pretend that the horrible things that had happened at home hadn't been real, but they had been. If she'd had any doubt, the conversation she'd had with the vet earlier, when she'd phoned to check on Alec, would have removed it. The vet had said that Alec's hypothermia indicated he had been exposed to temperatures below freezing, far colder than it ever got in Bristol, much less on a rainy afternoon in November; after they had left, she had even discovered minor frostbite on his forepaws and the tip of his tail. She and everyone else at the surgery had been baffled. Barb had thanked her for looking after Alec so well, then ended the call and wept, both for what had happened and what could have.

"Barbara." Alison's sudden whisper jarred her out of her thoughts. "Look at this - I think I've found something."

Barb slid over into the chair next to Alison and leant close to see the page she was indicating, in a book called _Witchcraft in England: 1560-1660._

_John Collyer or Collier was a man whom all did fear, for that he was thought to be in league with the Devil, who had given him divers magickal powers. When asked if this were true he said that it was, and that he had sold his immortal soul in exchange for such, and laughed until those around him were right afraid for their lives._

_Right afraid for their lives_, Barb thought. _That sounds about right_. She read on.

_Though the magistrates wished to have the said John taken up for the many crimes of which he was accused, none dared enter his house to capture him, nor would any lay hands upon him in the street. He continued in his vile and unholy ways until men of the town, thinking to take him by surprise, did lie in wait for him in the dark beyond the river bridge, and strike a blow to his head that rendered him senseless. When he awoke he refused to demonstrate any of his arts, or to confess to his crimes, though methods both licit and illicit were employed to draw out the truth. This went on for days and weeks, until at last he could withstand no more, and he died cursing his captors, defiant to the end. His body was burnt on a pyre, though to do so was unlawful, and the bones that remained buried outside the sacred ground of the churchyard.  
_

"Dear God," she said. "But no one who was accused of witchcraft during that time really was a witch, everyone knows that - I mean, people did confess, but it was out of fear of torture, or as a result of it. The few who truly believed they were witches were most likely suffering from a grandiose delusional disorder, or bipolar schizoaffective, if they thought they could see or hear the Devil speaking to them ..." She trailed off, thinking of the Paul-voice she had heard the previous day. No doubt other psychologists would diagnose her as blithely as she had just labelled those long-ago people, but would they be right? Was she?

"Maybe John Collier was the only real witch in the lot," Alison said, staring down at the page.

"If he was a real witch, then he ought to have been able to stop them torturing him," Barb pointed out. "Why didn't he?"

"I suppose we'll have to ask him," Alison said. "That is, I will." Her voice was weary and resigned, and glancing at her face, Barb found it drawn in grim lines of dread.

"You don't want to, do you?" she asked, and knew even as she said it that it was true. She'd been so focused on her own fears and worries that she'd never really considered what it might cost Alison to deal with a spirit - any spirit, but particularly this one.

Alison hesitated, then shook her head. "No. But I have to."

"No, you don't," Barb said. Alison's left hand was still resting on the open book, and impulsively, she reached over and covered it with one of her own. Alison flinched as if startled and began to pull away, but then relaxed and sat still again. "If you think you have to because of Robert, you're wrong. He wouldn't want you to put yourself in a dangerous situation on his account, not after what happened at that seance. He cared about you too much for that. I know he did."

"He cared about you too; he'd want me to help you if I could," Alison said. "But I'm not only doing it for him, Barbara. I was, to start, but now I'm doing it for you as well. I want you to be safe, and you never will be as long as that spirit is in your house. Even if you never went back again, who's to say it couldn't get out and come looking for you? We don't even know what's been keeping it there. Someone has to do something to make certain it goes for good."

"I know," Barb said. She tightened her fingers round Alison's hand. "I owe you a lot already, you know. I don't know how I'm going to repay you when this is all over."

"Worry about that later," Alison said, and unbelievably, managed to smile. "If we don't survive, all debts are cancelled."

"I'll hold you to that," Barb said. The thought of the voice and the radio flitted through her mind again, and she took a deep breath. "Listen - there was something I wanted to tell you -"

"Aha, there you two are." Neil's voice came from behind them, low-pitched for the library's sake, but still light and cheerful. Both of them jumped and turned round, Barb letting go of Alison's hand in the process, and found him standing there with a smile. "How have you been getting on? Finding everything you need?"

"Absolutely," said Barb. "How was the skating? And the party?"

"Cold, wet and noisy, in that order," Neil said. His gaze flicked from her to Alison to the books spread out in front of them. "Alison, would you mind awfully if I borrowed Barbara for just a moment?"

"No, of course not," Alison said. "I'll just carry on with my reading."

Neil inclined his head toward a nearby door, and wondering what this was all about, Barb got up and followed him through it into a small, disused office.

"Is everything all right?" he asked the instant the door closed behind them.

"What? Yes, of course. Why?"

"Why? Well, you're here completely out of the blue, you rang me up on the spur of the moment which you never do, and I don't like to say it, Barb, but you look terrible. Really terrible, as if you haven't eaten or slept in a week. Your friend Alison doesn't look much better, and both of you have this look in your eyes ... if I didn't know better, I'd think you'd seen a ghost."

This was the last thing Barb had expected to hear, and she had to hold back a burst of hysterical laughter at how unwittingly accurate it was. _If you only knew!_ she thought, looking up into his kind, worried, middle-aged face and knowing that she'd never tell him.

"Everything is fine," she said with a conviction she didn't feel. "Really. I'm sorry I haven't got more time to visit at the moment, but next time I'm in the area I promise I'll come and collect on that dinner invitation."

Neil shifted position uncomfortably. "Look, Barb, I know we don't talk very often anymore - it must be a year since the last time - but you do know that if you were in some sort of trouble, I would help, don't you?"

"Of course I do. I asked if you could get me into the library, didn't I? And you did, and it's been a great help. I swear if I need anything else, I'll ask for that too, all right?"

"All right," said Neil at last. "Anything. Really. Even money."

"Yes, okay, even money," said Barb, desperate to get rid of him and get back to Alison. "Thanks."

Neil still looked reluctant, but he opened the door again and let her out, and after she promised to bring back his photocopier card, wandered off toward his office. Feeling shaky, as if she'd just had a near miss with a speeding car, Barb returned to the table where Alison was still sitting with her books.

"Do I look terrible?" she demanded.

Alison surveyed her.

"You look tired," she said at last.

"Well, no bloody wonder, I feel tired," said Barb crossly, and plumped down in her chair.

"Wasn't there something you were going to tell me before Neil came?" Alison asked.

"Never mind, it wasn't important," Barb said. "Let's see what else it says in that book. We've got to get home soon. There isn't much time."


	11. Chapter 11

It was nearly dark again by the time they left, the days getting noticeably shorter even from one to the next as autumn rushed toward winter. Against the dusk, the library's glass façade was an oasis of light, and Barb had a brief urge to turn and run back into its safety. Instead, she did up the buttons on her coat and then took one of their bags of notes and supplies off Alison, who was struggling under its weight.

"Take the other one too," Alison said. "I've got to sit down."

"What's the matter?" Barb caught the other bag as Alison all but fell onto a nearby bench. "Alison, what is it?"

"It's ... okay," Alison said in a strange, clipped voice, as if she were forcing each word out through a tiny chink in a vast wall of pain. "Comes and goes. I just ... need ... a minute." She hunched over, arms tight round her middle and ponytailed hair spilling forward across her shoulder, and appeared to be examining her new blue trainers.

Barb hovered, feeling helpless. If it were Robert, she would have known what to do, would have tried to offer comfort and support, but she didn't know Alison well enough yet for that. Moreover, she had begun to realise that Alison didn't like to be touched unexpectedly - she'd nearly jumped out of her skin when Barb had taken her hand earlier - and that a gesture meant to be gentle and reassuring might not be taken as such. She hesitated, bit her lip in indecision, and finally settled for sitting down on the bench beside Alison, hoping that her presence might help somehow.

"Is it getting better?"

"A bit," Alison said indistinctly. The dusk grew deeper, and Barb thought of what Robert had said about Alison's injuries; about the crash and the tangled metal and the spike that had torn through Alison's flesh and left a ruin behind. She couldn't begin to imagine so much pain. Her own life had been easy in that respect: she'd never broken a bone or had an operation or delivered a baby; had never suffered anything worse than ordinary bumps and bruises. Watching Alison sweating and shaking, she began to feel ashamed of the whole, sturdy, healthy body she took for granted most of the time. Who was she to have lived half a lifetime unscathed when Alison had been smashed to bits and stuck back together again?

"What about now?" she asked.

"Jesus. Yes, it's getting better." Alison straightened up halfway and propped her elbows on her knees, then glanced sidelong at Barb. "Don't look like that. I'm not going to die. Believe me, there have been times when it hurt so much I wished I would."

"Isn't there anything that can be done for it - some sort of surgery, or therapy, or meds?"

Alison shook her head. "Tried them. I've got to live with it, that's all. This is nothing compared to what it used to be; I had to move house, once, when the neighbours got sick of hearing me scream. Oh _no_ -" Her face contorted, and she folded in half again, hugging herself and breathing in shallow gasps. Too worried now to care whether it was wanted or not, Barb reached out to put a comforting hand on Alison's back, but was interrupted in mid-reach by the buzz of her mobile vibrating in her pocket.

"Oh God, it's Jude," she said, staring at the name on the incoming call screen.

"You'd better answer it," Alison said without looking up . "Go on. I'll be all right."

A bit reluctantly, Barb got up and walked down the path that led away from the library's main doors, flipping the phone open as she went.

"Barb?" Jude's voice was so familiar, so much a part of her ordinary life, that it sounded as if it were being beamed from a distant universe. Whilst she was still getting her head into the right place to answer, Jude tried again.

"Hello, are you there?"

"Yes, sorry, I was just distracted. Hello. What's going on?"

"Well ..." Jude sounded hesitant. "I was wondering if you'd mind looking after Morgan tonight. It would only be for a few hours - someone gave Clive tickets to a play, and we haven't been out together in ages -"

"Oh - oh, I'd love to, but I can't." She cast about for an excuse that would satisfy Jude without revealing too much. "I went away for the weekend."

"I didn't know you were planning to go away -- Morgan, don't, that's dirty. Leave it. I said leave it. Here, play with Thomas and Percy instead." Jude's voice had gone muffled and distant during this exchange, but now she returned at full volume. "Sorry, Barb - so is everything all right? Nothing's happened to your mum, has it?"

"No, no, not at all. I'm not with her," Barb said, and then embellished that truth with a barefaced lie. "I'm in London."

"You are? What are you doing there? Have you _met_ someone?" Jude asked with dawning delight. "You have! Where did you meet him? What's he like?"

"No, I haven't met anyone," said Barb, glancing back at Alison on the bench. Alison seemed to be recovering; she was sitting fully upright again, at any rate. "I just thought I'd get away for a few days and see some old friends. It was a last-minute sort of thing." It certainly _had_ been last-minute, she thought defensively, and she had seen Neil, who qualified as an old friend by any definition of the term. And she hadn't met anyone as such, because she had encountered Alison for the first time a good two years ago. She might be skating across the surface of the truth, but at least she wasn't lying to Jude any more than she had to.

"Well, good for you, anyway," Jude said, in a tone of warm approval that made Barb squirm. "You've been spending far too much time at work lately. Although I don't know who else I can get for tonight, not at this hour."

"I wish I could be there," Barb said. That, at least, was utterly, nakedly honest. She loved Morgan, as she'd loved Josh, and his small, safe, well-lit nursery world, with its toys and books and milk, seemed the perfect antidote to icy darkness and terror. What wouldn't she give to be sitting right now with Morgan on her lap, reading about the three bears and the wolf and the moon in the little rabbit's room?

"Never mind, just enjoy yourself," said Jude, and then, going distant again, "No, sweetheart, not in your mouth. Give it to Mummy. Thank you. Sorry - are you coming home tomorrow, then, to be at work for Monday?"

"I think so," Barb said. Alison had levered herself off the bench and was walking toward her, slowly and haltingly, as if it hurt to move. "I've got to go. I'll talk to you soon."

"Okay." Jude paused. "Barb?"

"Yes?"

"Are you sure everything's all right? You sound ... well, a bit odd."

"Absolutely sure," Barb said. "Bye." She snapped the phone shut again and dropped it back into her pocket as Alison reached her. Wet streaks shone on Alison's face in the golden light from the library windows, and without a word, Barb rummaged in her handbag, found a clean tissue and held it out.

"Thanks," Alison said. "What did Jude say?"

"Never mind that, what about you? Are you well enough to go on?"

Alison nodded, still blotting tears. "Is there a Catholic church round here?"

"Not right here," said Barb, "but there's one the next town over - St Edmund something, I think. We went to their summer fête one year, all three of us. Paul caught it when we came home for letting Stephen and me hitch lifts."

"Perfect," said Alison. "Can we go there? They'll be having evening Mass soon."

Barb looked at Alison's face, still pinched and white with the fading aftermath of pain, and wondered what was going through her head. It seemed a strange time to want to pray. "Yes, if you like, but do you mind if I ask why?"

"I want a priest to bless us both," Alison said, "and I want to get some sort of blessed object to take with us, if I can."

"What, seriously?" Barb started to laugh, but Alison was so obviously in earnest that she bit it back, not wanting to hurt her feelings. "Look, I know you were brought up with religious faith and I don't mean to make light of it, but surely you don't believe that objects have literal magical power, do you? I've got better at suspending my disbelief lately than I ever thought I would, but I don't think I can charge into my house brandishing a crucifix like Doctor Van Helsing or Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

"It doesn't matter if you or I believe in it or not," Alison said. "It matters if John Collier's spirit does. He was a real person once, Barbara, you can't forget that, and he lived in a time when people _did_ believe in that sort of magic. The book said that he told the townspeople he'd sold his soul to the Devil, so he must have believed in it too."

"Like the placebo effect, you mean," Barb said. "If a patient believes medicine will help him, then it does, whether it has any active ingredients or not. If an evil spirit believes a blessed object stops him hurting us ..."

"Then it does," Alison said.

"Yes, well, there's a problem with that," said Barb. "The placebo effect doesn't work unless the subject truly believes in the efficacy of the treatment. Suppose your credulous townspeople showed him a Bible or waved a prayer book at him, and he learnt then that it couldn't stop him? Or suppose he's simply worked out sometime in the last few hundred years that the medicine is only sugar, so to speak?"

"Then we haven't lost anything by trying," Alison said. "We have to confront him one way or the other. We may as well go armed with whatever protection we can get."

"Now there's a theory I can subscribe to," Barb said. "All right, I suppose it can't hurt. Can you walk all the way back to the car, though? It's so far, and you still don't look well."

"I'll be fine," Alison insisted, but she wavered even as she said it, and Barb decided it was time to put her foot down for Alison's own good.

"I don't think so," she said. "You've already helped me in more ways than I can count. Let me help you where I can." She picked up the carrier bags in one hand, then offered her other arm to Alison. That was the key, she thought. Alison had taken her hand to lead her round her house, had held her when she cried, had slept curled up beside her all night. Alison didn't mind _touching_; it was _being touched_ that made her uncomfortable. So Barb waited, not pressing the issue, and with only a slight hesitation, Alison linked her arm through Barb's and leant against her, tentatively at first; then, seeing Barb really meant to support her, with all her weight.

"I've walked a lot of patients down hospital corridors this way," Alison said. "I hope I'm not as heavy on you as they were on me."

"Not at all," Barb assured her. "Not at all."


	12. Chapter 12

Two hours later, Alison sat curled up in the passenger seat of Barbara's car, lulled by the hum of the engine and the flicker of motorway lights going past. She'd taken the largest dose of oxycodone she dared, and it had driven the last of the pain away, leaving her as hollow and empty inside as the high vault of the church they'd visited. There, she'd told a weary-looking young priest a vague story and received a cheap St Michael medal, which she'd hung round Barbara's neck on the theory that Barbara needed protection most. The priest had blessed them both with chrism as well, and now the car was full of a sweet balsam scent that reminded Alison pleasantly of her long-ago confirmation. She wished there were something that could give Barbara the same sort of comfort, false though it might be. You didn't have to be psychic to see the apprehension written all over Barbara's face, even in profile.

"All right if I use your phone again?" she asked.

Barbara said that it was, and Alison picked the phone up and dialled Helen's number for the fifth time since they'd left the church. She was desperate to reach Helen, not so much because she thought Helen would be able to tell her how to deal with John Collier's spirit, but because she wanted so badly to talk to someone who _understood_. Barbara was trying hard, but her belief in such things was new and fragile, not the bone-deep knowledge of someone who'd lived an entire life at the overlapping edge of two worlds.

"No answer?"

Alison shook her head, listening to the endless ringing. Worry for Helen was beginning to creep in round the edges of her worry about their situation in general. Helen was old and hard of hearing, but by that token, she should be safely ensconced in her chair at half past six on a Saturday evening, with her dogs at her feet and the phone close to hand. If something had happened - no, she'd know if something had, she was certain of it.

"Please be there," she whispered. "Please be all right."

Barbara threw a swift glance in her direction. "Whom are you trying to reach, or shouldn't I ask?"

"Her name is Helen - she was a friend of my aunt's, I've known her since I was a little girl." As she said it, she had a sudden, vivid memory of sitting at the kitchen table between Vi and Helen, watching as Helen's eyes turned back to show blank, dead whites, as the pencil in her limp hand scrawled across a sheet of paper of its own accord, scratching out a mad mixture of words and names and numbers. She'd screamed and cried until Vi had blown out the candles and shaken Helen back to consciousness, and for weeks afterward, she'd refused to do any work at school, terrified that something would take over her body as soon as she picked up a pencil and force her to write what it wanted to say.

"Helen sees things," she added. "The way I do."

"Can she help us then, do you think?"

Alison looked out the rain-spattered window at the dark landscape rolling past, bringing her ever closer to the inevitable confrontation.

"No," she said at last. "I've got to do it on my own."

"Not all on your own," Barbara said. "I'll be there too." Her voice was unsteady but resolute, and Alison felt a rush of warmth toward her. When she was waiting in Robert's office to meet Barbara for the first time, she'd asked him what Barbara was like, and he'd grinned and said that Barbara was bossy, stubborn and thought she was always right, but at the end of the day, there was no one better to have on your side. She was beginning to see what he'd meant.

"You've got a lot of bottle, Barbara Anne," she said sleepily.

She'd said it without thinking, not really expecting any sort of response, and so it came as a shock when Barbara jerked in her seat, slewing the wheel to the left and all but running off the carriageway. Someone's horn blew; a small white car dodged into another lane to avoid them. Alison had a blurry impression of guard rails and shadowy trees, tall and unyielding, but before she could do more than think _Oh God, we're going to crash,_ Barbara got control, downshifted, and came to a rough but serviceable stop at the outside edge of the hard shoulder, where they sat with the windscreen wipers still going and the lights pointing askew at a clump of leafless sycamores that could have killed them.

Barbara shut the engine off and turned on Alison, wild-eyed and nearly panting. "You can't know that. I haven't - you can't."

"Know what? God, what's the matter? All I said was -"

"You said Barbara Anne, it's my full name, but I know I never ..." Her eyes narrowed. "Have you been going through my things behind my back?"

"No," Alison said in righteous indignation, before remembering that she had, in fact, done just that the night Barbara had stayed at her house. But she'd only had a cursory glance at the contents of Barbara's handbag; she hadn't thumbed through her credit cards or inspected her driving licence, and she certainly hadn't done the little she had done with the intent to harm.

Barbara closed her eyes, struggling to get hold of herself. "It's only my brother -- well, he would call me Barbara Anne to tease me. When I was really young I thought it was brilliant that there was a song with my name in it, and then by the time I was eleven or twelve it had become the most embarrassing thing in the world, and so of course Paul, who was a wonderful brother, but also a teenage boy, would go round the house singing it because he knew it got up my nose. My mother made him stop, so he switched to just saying Barbara Anne whenever he got the chance. I never thought I would miss it, but after he died, I did." She rubbed her forehead as if it ached. "I hadn't heard anyone say it like that for years until --"

"I didn't know," Alison said. "I swear it. I know what you're going to say, that I could have seen your full name on a letter or something in your house, or looked it up when we were doing all that research, and I suppose I could have, but I didn't. It just sounded right, so I said it. You don't have to believe me."

"I do believe you," Barbara said. "It isn't logical, but what the hell has been over the last few days?" She laughed, shakily. "We've got to get off the shoulder before someone comes along and hits us. We're not very far from home. We'll be there in less than an hour, and then we can go to ... oh ..."

"Don't think about it until you have to," advised Alison.

Rather than answer, Barbara started the car, let out the clutch and promptly stalled the engine. "Oh God. No, it's okay. It's all right." She waved off Alison's concern and tried again, and in a few seconds they got up to speed and rejoined the flow of traffic. Wind blew the ever-present rain hard against the windows, and doing her best to take her own suggestion, Alison curled up in her seat again and let herself drift away for a bit, which was easy to do with the oxycodone still working its magic inside her. She was dimly aware of time passing, and the car slowing and stopping under bright lights and then starting again, but not much else registered until Barbara shook her by the shoulder.

"Alison."

"Mmmhh."

"We're here."

She let her head roll to the side and opened bleary eyes, and Barbara's house stared back at her from all its windows, somehow managing to look like a forbidding hulk despite its tall, narrow build. Waves of malevolence and ill will rolled out of it toward her; the spirit inside knew she was there, and didn't like it. There were no words, but the message was clear: _Go away_.

"He's still in there," she said.

"I know it," said Barbara, and Alison glanced over to see that she'd gone deathly pale, as if she were about to faint or be sick or both. She'd pulled the elastic out of her hair, and it hung round her face in untidy dark waves, making her look both softer and younger. Paul would have recognised her straightaway as his little sister, Alison thought.

"Can you hear him?" she asked.

"No. But I can feel him - it - something." Her chin quivered, and for a moment her expression was so vulnerable that Alison wanted to reach over and hug her. "It's inside my _head_."

Alison nodded. "Mine too."

"I keep thinking that this must be what it's like to be schizophrenic," Barbara said miserably. "I've studied so many patients with that diagnosis, and I never realised how real it must have seemed to them, how frightened they must have been. I kept telling myself that they were people, but really I thought of them as specimens, like lab rats, with interesting conditions that I could publish papers on. It was horrible of me."

"You didn't know," Alison said. "Now you do."

Barbara bit her lip and looked at the house. "We've got to go in, haven't we?"

"You can wait here," Alison said. "It might be safer if you did."

"I said I wouldn't leave you on your own, and I won't," Barbara said in a tone that was closed to argument, and both of them got out of the car without another word.

The sensation of hate and malice got stronger as they got nearer the house, and as they approached the front door, Alison realised she was walking with her head down, leaning forward as if it were a tangible thing she had to push through. Barbara unlocked the door and opened it, revealing nothing but pitch blackness and releasing a wave of frigid air and a stench that made them both choke. It was like opening the door to a cold store full of rotting meat, Alison thought, holding her sleeve over her face in a futile attempt to block some of it out. Very faintly, she caught a hint of balsam, and remembering the holy oil still on her forehead from the priest's blessing, she swiped her fingers across it and then under her nose. Maybe it was sacrilegious, but if there really were a God, she thought He would give her a pass on this one.

Barbara had followed Alison's lead with the oil, and now, holding her breath, she leant in through the doorway, reached for an unseen light switch, and snapped it down, then up, then down again. Nothing happened.

"There's no point to checking the mains, I assume," she said as she drew back.

"Not likely, no," said Alison.

Barbara's mouth firmed into a grim line of determination. "Well, we won't have to go crashing through the dark, anyway," she said, and reaching into her pocket, produced a pair of small electric torches in black plastic casings. She handed one to Alison and switched the other one on, splashing a pool of light onto the door mat.

"I bought them when I was paying for the petrol," she said, seeing Alison's surprise. "I hated it in the graveyard last night. I didn't want to be caught out that way again."

Armed with the torches, they went inside, Barbara automatically pulling the door shut behind her, and stopped in the entrance hall. The atmosphere inside the house had definitely worsened whilst they'd been away, with the trapped spirit exerting whatever influence it could over its surroundings. A faint, frosty white mist drifted all round them and glimmered in the torch beams like dust in a shaft of sunlight. Both of them were already shivering, Barbara harder than Alison, as if the chill from Thursday night had been lurking somewhere deep in her body all this time, waiting for its chance to emerge. The room was quiet except for a small, rapid clicking noise; Alison puzzled over it for a moment, trying to work out what it was, and suddenly realised it was Barbara's teeth chattering. They weren't going to be able to stay too long.

"Come on," she said. "It must be below freezing, or close to it. We've got to keep going to stay warm."

Barbara swung her torch beam round abruptly, as if chasing some fast-moving object. The light flashed across walls and stairs and furniture, but revealed nothing. "I thought I saw something moving." Her voice was a dry whisper. "A shadow -- it's gone now. Upstairs, I think."

"Stay close," Alison said. "He's here."

"Where?" Barbara crowded against her, shoulder to shoulder, and Alison felt her trembling through the double thickness of coats. At the same time, she felt a surge in the powerful emotions that surrounded them, and without stopping to consider, put her hand over Barbara's mouth.

"Sshh. Keep quiet." She concentrated hard, working out what was happening, and identified pleasure and satisfaction among the other, uglier feelings that made up John Collier's personality. Oh, he was a vain one, this man. He'd enjoyed having his neighbours frightened of him when he was alive. He'd wanted to be acknowledged as a witch; he'd been terribly pleased when he was. And --

"He likes you talking," she said to Barbara. "He wants you to notice him. Don't say another word, whatever happens, understand?"

Barbara's eyes were wide and dark and her lips were cold under Alison's fingers; she nodded, and Alison let go, knowing by now that she could be trusted to keep a promise. Leaning hard against the force that wanted to hold her back, she started climbing the stairs with Barbara right beside her, looking for its source. She hadn't been past the ground floor on her previous visit, and when they reached the landing at the top of the stairs, she hesitated, not certain where to go next.

"I'm going to look behind some doors, all right?" she said to Barbara, who made a small gesture of assent and tightened her grip on her torch. Alison took two steps, polished floorboards creaking under her shoes, and pushed open the first door on her right to reveal a spare room that had been converted into an office, with a wall of bookshelves, a small sofa, and a desk that looked as if ten years' worth of paperwork had exploded on it. She shut that door and tried the next one, in which a massive claw-footed bath occupied most of the space. Beyond that was another spare room, this one set up to receive guests; then an odd, poky little room with nothing in it but a ladder that must lead to the loft. At the very end of the corridor were Barbara's bedroom and ensuite bathroom, and they both turned away from that door, gagging; the smell, which they'd begun to get used to, was overwhelmingly strong there.

"No," Alison said, seeing the enquiry in Barbara's eyes. "He isn't in there now, but he has been. He's been there a lot."

In the torchlight, the look on Barbara's face was one of horror bordering on hysteria, and Alison didn't blame her one bit. More than anyplace else in the house, this room showed clear signs of being well used, with the flowered duvet thrown back, jewellery scattered across the bureau top, a pair of shoes kicked under a chair, and an empty glass and stack of books on the bedside table. Barbara owned the whole house, but she _lived_ in this room, and in the untidy little office at the head of the stairs. The thought of an evil spirit choosing to spend its time here was repulsive, a violation.

"We'll make it all right," she promised. "I don't know how, but after all this is sorted, we'll find a way for you to feel safe here again."

Barbara drew a long, shuddering breath, then visibly composed herself and pointed at the floor. _Downstairs?_

"Has to be," Alison said. "Are you all right to keep going?"

Barbara tucked her torch under one arm and rubbed her hands together. _I'm cold._

"So am I. Just a few more minutes, and then if he hasn't shown himself, we'll leave and come back, okay?"

_Okay_, Barbara said with a curled thumb and index finger. Her hand was shaking almost too hard to make the gesture, and Alison mentally revised "a few more minutes" to "three or four, if that many." She didn't think she could hold out much longer herself; she wasn't hurting from the cold, thanks to the painkillers still circulating in her system, but her feet felt like blocks of marble inside her trainers, and that meant frostbite couldn't be too far away. She gave Barbara a gentle nudge to get her moving, and together they went down the stairs again, through the lounge and dining room and kitchen, shivering and coughing, but finding nothing.

At last they reached the glass-walled conservatory, and as Alison stepped in, she saw, finally, the spirit of John Collier.


	13. Chapter 13

She saw it in the corner of her vision first, an amorphous thing with the vague outline of a human form, only just visible in the reflected light from the conservatory's glass panels. An instant later, Barbara made a strangled, despairing noise, and Alison knew she had seen it too.

"Ssshh." She put her hand over Barbara's mouth again, in warning. "Remember. Not a word."

Barbara's breathing was fast and shallow against Alison's skin, and Alison thought for a moment that she might simply turn and bolt, but instead she pushed the silencing hand away and pointed at the spirit urgently, as if to say _Do something_!

"All right," Alison said in a low voice. "I don't know what's going to happen, so you've got to be ready for anything." Cramming her torch into her pocket, she felt round Barbara's neck, searching with clumsy half-frozen fingers for the thin chain that held the St Michael medal. She thought she had it twice before she finally managed to hook her thumb through it and pull it free, letting the medal itself dangle across the buttoned-up front of Barbara's coat.  
_  
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle_, she thought as she turned to face the spirit.

"I see you," she whispered. Her breath puffed out in a warm white cloud to mingle with the mist already hanging in the air. "And you see me -- don't you, John Collier?"

At the sound of its name, the spirit seemed to reorganise itself, shifting and solidifying until she could almost make out the lines of features -- a hawkish nose, a high forehead. Contempt radiated from it, but there was surprise as well, and a healthy dose of that overweening pride she'd felt before: it wanted very much to have Barbara's attention, but being recognised by anyone was not displeasing. As it focused on her, its body settled into a more clearly male shape with the suggestion of a long, loose coat or cloak around it.

_You, woman? You can see me? You know who I am?_

"That's right," Alison said, hoping she sounded calmer than she felt. She'd been frightened of spirits in the past, but this one made her want to crawl under the nearest piece of furniture and hide. Only the thought of Barbara beside her, trusting her to do the right thing and protect them both, gave her the fortitude to keep talking. Could Barbara hear the spirit too, she wondered, or only see it? She stole a sideways glance at Barbara's face – a study in fear and confusion – and thought it must be the latter.

_You are not wanted here_, the spirit said.

"Oh, I think I am," Alison said. "I've been invited. And that makes one of us, because you certainly haven't been."

_I was addressed_, said the spirit. _I was acknowledged. I was given a gift. So I followed. If that is not an invitation, what is?_

"You mean the flower, I suppose," Alison said. "You've got it all wrong, mate. She gave it to you to be kind, because she felt sorry for you. It wasn't a -- a marriage proposal." Barbara flinched at that, and Alison caught hold of her free hand and gripped it as hard as she could, even though her own hand was all but useless by now from the cold. Somewhere in the back of her mind, her inner diagnostician ticked off one of the first signs of hypothermia; next would come drowsiness and nausea, then confusion and stumbling. Blue extremities. Difficulty speaking. Irrational behaviour. Organ failure. Death. She gave Barbara's hand another squeeze and was reassured when Barbara squeezed back.

_I had seen her before_, the spirit mused. _She was a girl then, come with her family to honour her brother, and she wept for him as no one had wept for me._

"People thought you were a witch," Alison said. She paused. "Were you one?"

_I hated them_, the spirit said scornfully,_ because they hated me, and I did all the evil to them I could. And when they caught me, they burnt me. By law I should have hanged, but they burnt me, and I have been burning ever since. I surround myself with all the cold I can summon, and still I burn._

"But they burnt your body after you were already dead," Alison said. "What did it matter to you then?"

_They burnt me alive!_ the spirit insisted. _Alive! _Its rage billowed up and out like a great invisible cloud, pushing at her until she could barely breathe. Barbara was in an even worse state, gasping for air, her lips visibly blue in the light from her torch. Ice crystals clung to her hair and crusted the shoulders of her coat, making her look as if she had been walking in the snow.

"Stop it!" Alison said sharply. "You're hurting her. You're hurting us both. We'll die if you make it any colder."

_They shut me in a prison and then they burnt me_, the spirit raved. _Now I am in prison again. Tell him to let me go. I will not be trapped this way, I will not. Tell him to let me go!_

"Tell who?" Alison let go Barbara's hand and took an impulsive step toward the spirit. "What's keeping you here, John Collier?"

_Tell him! Tell him!_

Behind them, a burst of static and confused noise erupted from the kitchen, and Alison spun round to see the face of an under-cupboard radio glowing bright orange in the dark, its digital display flickering as it scanned up and down through the stations. She caught snatches of a violin concerto, a weather report, a comedy show and something that sounded like polka music, and then, at top volume, a punk band bashing their way through a song she vaguely remembered from her teenage years:

"I GOT A NEW ROSE, I GOT HER GOOD  
GUESS I KNEW THAT I ALWAYS WOULD  
I CAN'T STOP TO MESS AROUND  
I GOT A BRAND NEW ROSE IN TOWN"

Barbara moaned and made a lunge toward the kitchen, as if hoping to switch the radio off, but Alison caught her by the arm before she could get far. It was more a cautionary gesture than a real attempt to hold her back – Barbara was taller and heavier, and would almost certainly win any physical contest between them – but Barbara understood it and gave in without a fight. In the kitchen, the radio crackled and changed stations again, zooming through pop and reggae and squealing bagpipes, until it stopped and Brian Wilson's unmistakable falsetto wailed out:

"YOU'VE GOT ME ROCKIN' AND A-ROLLIN'  
ROCKIN' AND A-REELIN' -"

The music shut off abruptly amid a shower of blue sparks, and Alison fought down an urge to retch as the acrid smell of smoke and melting plastic joined the reek of decay that still surrounded them. At the same moment, Barbara gasped and clapped her hand to her throat as if she'd been stung by a bee, just above the chain that held the medal.

_Leave me be or I will harm her! That Papist rubbish round her neck is no protection. I will spill her blood and you cannot stop me!_

_Oh Christ, we've got to get out of here_, Alison thought. Wild energy was all round them now, ebbing and flowing in a strange push-pull that felt like giants playing tug-of-war. She reached out for Barbara again, but before she could get hold of her, something invisible slashed at her hand, and she jerked it back involuntarily.

_Very well then_, snarled the spirit, _I will hurt this one instead_. Another slash caught her high on the cheekbone, then a third across her ear, and then they were coming so thick and fast that she could only throw her arms up to protect her face and head. Through the assault, she heard Barbara cry out – whether in surprise or pain, she couldn't tell – and the clatter of a hard object falling to the wood floor and rolling away. She was terrified for a moment that something awful had happened, and then Barbara grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her, with immense, panicky strength, further into the conservatory.

"No, don't –" She struggled, thinking that the cold had confused Barbara into pulling them both toward danger rather than away from it, until they came up against a glass-panelled door and she realised that it opened onto the garden. The spirit surged forward, clearly intent on doing more damage, but Barbara had already let go of Alison with one hand and wrenched at the door handle with the other.

As the door swung outward, they stumbled and fell onto the sodden earth of the garden together, and Barbara, whose legs were longer, kicked the door shut behind them with an almighty crash that set a neighbour's dog barking. On the other side, Alison felt the spirit raging in impotent frustration: whatever force had kept it inside the house until now was still in effect. The glass panes shuddered in their frames, making a high, eerie humming noise like the sound of a finger being run round the rim of a wine glass, but held firm.

She let her head fall back onto the ground and lay there with Barbara half on top of her, listening to the dog's ongoing complaints._ We should get up_, she thought, but the idea seemed so daunting that she didn't move. Better just to lie still and rest. She could see now how people died of exposure even when rescue was only a few steps away; they simply felt too tired to save themselves.

At last, Barbara got her breath back, and with a massive effort, untangled herself from Alison and leant over her on hands and knees, heedless of the mud. Between her dark hair and coat, the pale oval of her face seemed to float, disembodied, in the ambient light from next door's windows. Melting ice dripped from her clothes.

"You're bleeding," Alison said in a croaky voice, and pointed at a long, oozing scratch above Barbara's left eye.

"Me!" Barbara sat back on her heels and dragged an arm impatiently across her forehead. "I'm not worried about me, I'm worried about you. You look like a plate of mince. What the hell happened in there? How could something with no body hurt us physically? It isn't possible." She hit the ground for emphasis, her open palm making a flat, smacking sound that hurt Alison's ears. "It isn't possible!"

"Of course it's possible!" Alison snapped. Pain and fear combined inside her and blossomed into anger, and she suddenly found the strength to wriggle backward and sit up herself. "Don't sit there bleeding all over the place and telling me it isn't possible. Did you do that to yourself?"

"No," Barbara moaned. "I don't know. No."

"No, you fucking well didn't," Alison said. "And you know it's possible because you've seen it before with your own eyes. You were there when I came to Robert's boat, the night that boy's spirit twin attacked me. Daniel One and Daniel Two, remember?"

"I remember." Barbara gingerly touched the scratch on her forehead, then felt inside the collar of her coat and drew her hand out to inspect her fingers for blood. "A lot of good your 'blessed object' did me. But you –" She looked back at Alison. "There's an emergency department at the BRI. We should go there – you need to have those cuts looked at."

Alison shook her head. "Too much explaining. I have all the supplies at home; I can see to both of us there, and we can talk about what Collier said. You couldn't hear him at all, could you?"

"No," Barbara said. Her expression was troubled and evasive, and Alison frowned.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. I couldn't hear him, only what you were saying to him. But I saw – something." She swallowed hard and tucked her hands up under her arms, trying to warm them. "I would have thought it was a trick of the light, but there wasn't any light except ours. And speaking of that – I dropped my torch so I could hold onto you. It was still switched on when it fell; we ought to be able to see the beam through the windows, but there's nothing. It's just black."

Alison craned her neck and saw it was true: from the outside, the glass might as well have been coated in ink. She imagined what it would be like to still be inside, and shuddered. Whatever else John Collier was or had been, she was quite certain now that he was insane.

"Thanks for getting me out," she said. "I'd never have found the door on my own. I owe you."

"I've lost track of who owes what to whom," said Barbara. "And I hope you don't think I'd have left you there in any case."

"No," Alison said. "I don't think you would have, Barbara Anne."

The guilty look flickered across Barbara's face again, but Alison didn't comment on it. Things were beginning to come together.

---

**Notes**

Sorry this one's on the short side, but it was a natural breaking point. Next section is from Barb's POV.

Also, thanks to everyone who's been reading so far - I know I'm not always the fastest updater and I appreciate your patience!

**Songs in this chapter**

The Damned, 'New Rose' (single), Stiff Records, 1976  
Beach Boys, 'Barbara Ann' (single), Capitol Records, 1965


	14. Chapter 14

The last time Barb had been inside Alison's house, she'd thought it old and shabby, with a vague charity-shop smell of second-hand clothes and dusty glassware. It still was all those things, but it was also beautifully warm and safe, and she was gladder to be there than she'd ever thought she would be. Her nose kept dripping, her feet felt full of pins and needles, and she couldn't stop shivering, but she was alive and all in one piece. She wished she could say the same for Alison.

"Don't you think you ought to look after yourself first?" she asked, muffled by the clean tea towel Alison had given her in lieu of a handkerchief. "You got the worst of it."

"This won't take long," Alison said. She'd thawed her hands back to flexibility under the kitchen tap, and was now busy unpacking a medical kit that rivalled a doctor's surgery, laying scissors and bandages and rolls of white tape out in a neat row on her table. Barb eyed an array of packaged hypodermic needles and wondered exactly what sort of drugs Alison had in there and where she had got them, but couldn't be bothered to ask. The adrenaline rush she'd had earlier had left her feeling weak and shaky and fragile when it went, and it was a relief simply to sit and be tended to like a child. A memory bubbled up, unbidden, of cutting herself on broken glass when she was quite young -- she'd been seven or eight, and Paul, in his early teens, had made her hold her bleeding hand out over the bath and then tipped a full bottle of Dettol onto it. How she'd screamed -- and Paul had said -- he had said --

"All right, let's have a look at you." Alison's voice broke into her thoughts, and obediently, she laid the towel aside and turned her chair so Alison could kneel in front of her and inspect the damage. The wound was outside her field of vision, but she could see drying streaks of blood like the prints of long, thin fingers across her chest. The middle streak disappeared into the scoop neck of her top just above her left breast, as if one finger had dared to explore further than its mates. She was regarding this sight in befuddled fascination when it occurred to her that Alison's face was right there too, all but level with her nipples, and suddenly embarrassed, she averted her eyes and stared over the top of Alison's head at the awful old avocado-green cupboards.

"How bad is it?" she asked.

"Not as bad as it looks," Alison said. She traced a ticklish line along Barb's neck, from her collarbone to just below her jaw. "There's a lot of vital stuff here, but none of it was touched. You must have a guardian angel."

"There's no such thing," Barb said automatically.

Alison's hand came to an abrupt stop, and she looked up with an expression so penetrating that Barb felt skewered to her chair like a butterfly in a specimen box. If not for the lingering chill inside her, she was sure she would have sweated under the intensity of it. She held her breath, but Alison only shrugged and reached past her for a square of gauze on the table.

"Well, you're bloody lucky, then. Hang on, this might sting a bit." She applied something that felt like molten lava to the cut, and Barb flinched. "Sorry. Have you had a tetanus jab lately?"

"Last year -- ouch!"

"I know. Only a bit more, I promise."

Alison's touch was light and deft and competent, and as she went about her work, Barb found herself thinking, almost in surprise, _She really is a nurse_. She had always known it, but the ideas of Alison-the-case-subject and Alison-the-medium had overshadowed the fact of Alison-the-nurse, a trained professional with a skill set no less valuable than her own. For that matter, Alison probably knew a great deal more about practical medicine than she did: she might have a 'Doctor' in front of her name and a lot of letters after it, but she wasn't qualified to do any more in a hospital than talk to people and scribble notes; she couldn't even dispense meds to patients who needed them. She felt as if she owed Alison an apology, but couldn't think how she would begin to phrase it.

"There," Alison said, standing up with a grimace of obvious pain. "It's long, but it isn't deep, and the one on your face is only a scratch. I don't think you'll have scars."

"I don't care if I do," Barb said.

"You ought to," Alison said. "They're ugly." She turned away and began washing her hands at the sink. "That John Collier, he was covered in them, you know. He was in prison so long that some of the things that were done to him had time to heal. He won't show them in his spirit form, but they're there."

Barb shuddered at the memory of that half-visible shape in the dark. "I don't want to talk about him yet, not until you're taken care of. What can I do to help?"

"Nothing." Alison shut off the water and turned round again, dripping hands held out in front of her. "I know you mean well, Barbara, but I've got scars too, bad ones, and I don't like having them looked at any more than Collier does his. People get frightened. Or disgusted. Or both."

"I won't," Barb said matter-of-factly. "I've sat in the witness box at trials and been shown crime-scene photos that were worse than the worst thing you can imagine. A few scars won't make me faint. I haven't got the sort of training you have, but I can stick on plasters, or at least point out where they want sticking. And you'll need someone to, unless you've got a third hand and eyes at the back of your head."

Alison let out a long, slow breath, too controlled to be a sigh. "All right. Wait a minute." She looked for something to dry her hands on, and seeing nothing else available, wiped them on Barb's discarded tea towel. Then she opened the fridge, took a bottle of red wine from the back of the top shelf, and uncorked it as skilfully as a sommelier.

"What's that for?"

"Medicinal purposes," Alison said, filling a glass. "Do you want one?"

"No thanks," said Barb, who still had a lingering headache from the previous night's overindulgence. Had they been in that hotel room only twenty-four hours ago? It felt like ten thousand years. Civilisations could have risen and fallen since she'd sat there drinking flat champagne and pontificating about the nature of evil.

"Draw the curtains then," Alison said. "I don't want anyone but you to see me."

Together they counted seventeen separate injuries: scratches of varying lengths on Alison's face, neck and chest; shallow cuts on both forearms that Barb recognised at once as defensive wounds; and an ugly laceration on her lower back, where something had ripped right through the layers of coat and jumper and blouse. Barb made another plea for the hospital upon seeing that one, but Alison shook her head and handed over a box of steri-strips instead. Defeated, Barb cleaned and bound the wound as gently as possible, taped a pristine white dressing in place, and then looked away for politeness' sake as Alison assembled a needle and syringe and administered a dose of antibiotic to herself. By the time she looked back again, Alison had pulled the needle out of her thigh and was doing up zips and buttons, covering the shiny, rippled expanse of healed scar tissue that lay across her abdomen and right hip. Barb had tried not to stare at that, as she could tell how self-conscious Alison felt about it, but she hadn't been able to help sneaking a few fascinated glances. The sheer extent of the damage was startling – Alison must have been hospitalised for weeks, if not months after her accident – but she'd found it neither repulsive nor horrifying, only sad. She thought of telling Alison so, but suspected that the words would fall on deaf ears. Oh, where was Robert when she needed him?

"Are you sure you'll be all right?" she asked again as Alison repacked her kit.

"If I'm not, you can say you told me so all the way to the casualty ward," Alison said, and locked the box with a decisive snap. "But I'm sure. It isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to me. You saw that much." She cast a flicker of a glance at Barb from beneath lowered lashes, as if checking for a reaction. "Look, I've got to change clothes, and then we need to talk -- really talk. Just make yourself at home, all right? Have some wine."

Barb sat at the table and listened to the heavy plod of Alison's feet on the stairs and the creak-bang of a door closing, then put her head down on her folded arms and shut her eyes. All day long, she'd been nursing a glimmer of hope that it would all turn out to be a mistake, and that she'd be sleeping warm and snug in her own bed tonight. Instead, she was about to spend another night on Alison's lumpy sofa, separated from all the home comforts she normally enjoyed. Even worse was that home itself had become a source of horror, in which everything she loved was tainted by darkness and corruption. How could she ever live there again without thinking of the things she had seen? How could she soak in the bath or curl up in bed with the Sunday papers or cook dinner with the radio on – oh God, the _radio_ –

She shoved her chair back, desperate to derail that train of thought before it could go any further. Cooking – cooking was something she could do anywhere, wasn't it? Yes, even here.

The thought of a proper meal was soothing in its ordinariness, and she got up and started poking through Alison's fridge and cupboards, looking for anything she could use. Alison didn't seem to have done any shopping lately, and what food there was came mostly in tins and packets, but after a bit of investigation, she found some eggs and half a loaf of bread that looked all right. If Robert were here, she thought, he would remind her that making toast instead of thinking about things that frightened her was a classic sign of avoidance. She pondered that as she filled a pan for the eggs, and then decided that she didn't give a shit if it was. After three days of being frightened more or less non-stop, she'd earned the right to indulge in a little avoidance if she liked.

She laid the table with Alison's mismatched plates and cups; set out the eggs and toast and butter and jam; and was pouring boiling water over tea bags when Alison reappeared, her torn and bloodied clothes changed for well-worn jeans and a floppy black jumper, and her scratches looking red and raw and painful. A bemused expression spread across her face, and Barb cleared her throat, feeling awkward.

"I thought we could do with some food," she said. "I know it's the wrong time for breakfast, but ..."

"No, it was a good idea," Alison said, and sat down. "I hate to cook. Maybe you ought to move in permanently."

"Yes, well, it may come to that yet," Barb said. She looked at her plate and was suddenly ravenous. Had they eaten at all that day? She had a vague memory of scoffing down a chocolate bar at some point between the hotel and the library, but beyond that, nothing. If this carried on she would waste away, she thought, knocking the top off her egg and diving in. Alison, seemingly lost in thought, picked up a slice of toast and plastered it with cherry jam, turning the toast in her hand and angling the knife as precisely as if her life depended on covering every available bit of surface area.

"Why do you think Collier's spirit followed you from the graveyard?" she asked.

Barb had been expecting this question, or one similar, but actually hearing it made her stomach do a nauseous flip, and her food lost some of its savour. She forced herself to take another bite of egg anyway, thinking that she'd be damned if she'd let that ghost-thing make her ill from lack of nourishment.

"It's to do with the rose I put on his grave," she said. "That was the only thing I did differently from the hundred other times I've been there. And he said something to you about it too, didn't he?"

Alison nodded and bit into her sticky slice of toast. "He said that you acknowledged him and gave him a gift. That's what he likes -- attention, being recognised. He thrives on it. You noticed him once, and everything he's done since he came to your house has been to make you notice him again."

"It worked," Barb said dryly.

"It's the sort of person he is," Alison went on. "He thinks he's owed attention. It was the worst punishment for him really, ending up in an anonymous grave without even a proper marker, no one knowing who he was or how frightened people had been of him when he was alive. He liked having them afraid; that's why he cursed them and told them he was in league with the Devil. He loved seeing them turn away from him on the street. It made him feel powerful. But it wasn't only an act, you know – he believed he was a witch, completely, and he thought he was better than everyone else because of it. He still does. Why are you smiling?"

"Because that's _psychosis_," Barb said. Things began to click into place in the bit of her mind that specialised in making diagnoses, and she felt a great, warm rush of relief. Here was something that made real sense to her; something she understood. "It's grandiose delusions. Paranoid schizophrenics have them, or sometimes people with bipolar disorder – they have fantastical ideas about their own importance, and quite often they think they have supernatural powers as well." She paused. "I wouldn't normally ask this, but _has_ he got supernatural powers?"

"Well, he has now," Alison said, "because he's in spirit and isn't bound by the rules of the flesh anymore. That's why he can do things like cutting and scratching without touching us, or dropping the temperature so low we can't bear it. But when he was alive, I don't think he could do any of that. You said it yourself – he wouldn't have let them torture him or burn him if he could."

"So we're back to the question of madness or evil," Barb said. She realised she'd been clutching her spoon all this time, and laid it on the battered surface of the table. "Which is it?"

"Both," Alison said. "It's one thing to think you have magical powers, and another thing to want to hurt people with them. And he does want to hurt people. He's so full of hate, Barbara. You must have felt it. He hates everyone and everything for being lower than he is. He hates the people who burnt him. He hates me. And he especially hates the person who's keeping him in your house."

_Oh God_, Barb thought. The buoyant confidence of a moment before dissolved in an instant, and she stared down at her half-eaten egg in its chipped pink cup.

"Collier said 'tell him to let me go,'" Alison said. "He said it twice. Do you know who 'he' is, Barbara?"

---

TBC


	15. Chapter 15

"You do know, don't you?" Alison prompted.

Barb couldn't take her eyes off her egg. It was beginning to look like an eye itself; an outsize eye with a runny, diseased yellow pupil. It stared up at her until she thought she might do something mad - scream, or cry, or tear off all her clothes and run out into the night.

"How could I possibly know that?" she said, and turned the egg cup over on her plate in self-defence.

"Don't," Alison said sharply. "You saw what happened at your house. We both could have been killed tonight. If that cut of yours had gone deeper and to one side, it would have severed an artery. You'd have bled out on the floor and I wouldn't have been able to help you."

Before she could stop it, Barb's hand went to the neat bandage on her neck, probing with tentative fingers so as not to awaken the fresh, raw soreness underneath. She didn't want to acknowledge the reality of what Alison was saying, but she could picture it all too clearly: the dark, the cold, and her own body lying there with its lifeblood pulsing away, each slowing spurt sending a cloud of steam into the icy air. Her last sight on earth would have been of Alison dying beside her as Collier's spirit loomed above them, and then what? A white light? Oblivion? Or both of them trapped there forever with him, in the same strange, shadowy plane of existence, unable to get away? What could one spirit do to another?

"You know it's true," Alison said. "You've got to be straight with me. If you know anything, anything at all, tell me now, even if you're embarrassed or you think it's not important."

Barb glanced unwillingly at her plate, where yolk was now oozing from beneath the rim of the upended cup as if someone had punctured the eye with a needle. She got up and went to lean against a cupboard so she wouldn't have to look at it any more, as well as to put some distance between herself and Alison. The next time she interviewed someone, she thought, she would be far gentler: she'd always thought herself a compassionate interrogator, but she hadn't realised how intense the pressure of simply being questioned could be.

_Just get it out and be done with it_, she thought.

"I've been hearing my brother's voice," she said. "At first I thought I was just talking to myself. I do that sometimes when I'm trying to solve a problem - I imagine what another person would say about it, how they would approach it. If it worked for Plato and Socrates, why not for Barbara Sinyard, doctor of psychology?" She let out a short, wry laugh. "But it was different this time. Separate, as if the voice were coming from outside me, from everywhere and nowhere. It isn't easy to explain."

"How many times have you heard it?"

Barb tried to remember. "Twice – maybe three times – all on Friday, while we were still in Bristol. When I was trying to decide whether to go home or not, he said that it wasn't safe and to get you first. Then just before we left to take Alec to the vets, he said to get out, out of the garden, because he couldn't do something."

"Couldn't do what?"

"I don't know; he just said 'Get out of here, Barbara Anne, I can't.' Then as soon as we left, I didn't hear him anymore, and I was glad not to. I thought -"

"That you were losing your mind," Alison supplied.

Barb nodded. "Auditory hallucinations are a symptom of dozens of mental illnesses."

"Oh, I see," Alison said, and now there was an edge to her voice. "So when you asked me if I could hear the spirits speaking, when we were at the hotel - was that because you wanted to know if you'd heard a spirit, or because you still thought I was a nutter and were wondering if you were one too?"

"Don't say it like that," said Barb, feeling wretched. "It sounds awful."

"But you did think it," Alison said.

"All right, maybe a bit, then, but not now. I have absolutely no more doubts about your mental state, either professionally or personally. I hereby pronounce you sane; there, are you happy? Would you like me to sign an affidavit, or can we can get back to discussing the issue at hand?" Emboldened by irritation and embarrassment, Barb returned to the table, snatched up the offending plate and deposited it in the sink, complete with toast crusts and oozing egg-eye. "There's more. Do you want to hear it?"

"I'd have liked to hear it two days ago, but better late than never," Alison said. "Let me guess, this next bit's got something to do with the radio, hasn't it? I don't think it was a coincidence that the one in your kitchen played your song and then packed up."

"Not only that one," Barb said, and explained how the radio in her car had nearly blown out the windows at Friday lunch. "It wasn't 'Barbara Ann' that time, though."

"No," Alison said thoughtfully, mopping up the last of her cold egg with a piece of toast. "'Barbara Ann' only came after you had told me what it meant. That was a message for both of us."

"What sort of message?"

"You tell me," Alison returned. "You know your brother better than I ever could. Why would he be there in your house, with John Collier?"

"To keep me safe," Barb said without hesitation. As far back as she could remember, even when Paul was only a little boy himself, she'd had perfect, unquestioning confidence in his ability to protect her. He had been the champion she'd enlisted against bullies, the haven she'd fled to when she was frightened of the dark, the guardian who kept a sharp lookout for cars as they crossed the road. After his death, she had grown up every bit as capable and independent as he would have wanted her to be, but she had never again felt the sense of complete safety she had taken for granted when they were together. The moment she'd realised it had gone forever was the moment her childhood had ended.

"He'd do that?"

"If he could," Barb said. Tears prickled at her eyes and she took a deep, steadying breath, hoping they wouldn't spill over and humiliate her. "If he knew I needed him and he could do it, yes, he'd move heaven and earth to reach me. But Alison, he's been gone for more than thirty years. I was barely in my teens when he died. There have been lots of times between then and now when – well, when I could have done with some help. Where was he then?"

"You got through all those times on your own though, didn't you? One way or another?"

"Yes," Barb admitted.

"Then you didn't really need him," Alison said. "Now you do. And you can see how you've been helped already, can't you? Just look at us – I look like shit, and you've hardly been touched. Collier tried to hurt you first, but he only got those two scratches in before something held him back and he turned on me instead. What if that something was your brother?"

Just for a moment, Barb felt relief and hope soar up inside her like a pair of birds on the wing. If Paul were really here, then everything would be all right somehow. He had told her long ago that he would kill anyone who hurt her or their brother Stephen: she could remember her own voice asking _Really_? in shocked delight at such bravado, and his, just beginning to break and deepen, saying _That's right. Kill them dead_. But that had been a child's promise, and death had come to Paul himself before he could ever follow through on it. She shook her head.

"It doesn't make sense," she said. "If Paul were there, why couldn't you see him or hear him? For that matter, why couldn't I? If he could talk to me from a distance, why not when he was in the same house with us? Why would Paul have let Collier leave the graveyard and come after me in the first place, and if he did, why trap him inside instead of just – just banishing him, or whatever the proper word for it is?"

Alison stood up and began clearing the table. "I don't know, Barbara. Even I don't know everything about the spirit world – I still learn new things from time to time, even after all these years. I know spirits can touch and communicate with each other, but I haven't got a clue what the limits of that are. I do know that Collier is very strong and he gets stronger when you pay attention to him, almost as if he's siphoning off some of your energy, your life force, for himself. Maybe holding him in the house is all Paul can manage."

"But –"

"Do you know that you heard your brother's voice?" Alison asked, pausing with a yellow cup in one hand and a pink flowered saucer in the other.

"Yes," Barb said at once.

"Then all the rest is just detail," Alison said. She put both plates in the sink, turned around and folded her arms across her chest like a wall. Her long chandelier earrings swayed; the crystal beads caught the overhead light and threw a glittering pattern onto the tired old lino. Glamour and shabbiness side by side -- it was Alison in a nutshell, Barb thought.

"Now suppose you tell me why you've been keeping this a secret," Alison said. "I've trusted you with a lot, you know. I thought you were beginning to trust me too."

"I was. I am." Barb twisted her hands together in her lap. "It isn't anything to do with trusting or not trusting."

"Why then?"

"I just –" She stumbled, not sure how to say it. "I just didn't want to believe that Paul could be a – a ghost. It's one thing to think of a ghost being someone who died centuries ago – not that I've ever believed in those stories about old haunted houses and churches and ruins, either – but for it to be my own brother seemed too awful, and too close. We used to argue over which television programme to watch, for God's sake. He was a real person, not a spook in a white sheet. Yes, I know," she said, seeing a look of disgust cross Alison's scratched face. "I know spirits aren't like that now. But I thought they were, you see. So given the choice between admitting that Paul was a ghost, and thinking that I was insane, I chose 'none of the above' and told myself it was my imagination."

"But it wasn't," Alison said.

"No, it wasn't," Barb said. The threatened tears finally escaped, and unable to find her tea towel, she wiped them away with a finger under each eye, wishing she hadn't bothered with mascara that morning after all. It certainly hadn't stopped Neil telling her she looked like death warmed up.

_Thanks a lot, Neil,_ she thought sourly, sniffing and trying to blink back the rest of the tears before they could do more damage.

"Anyway, I'm sorry," she said to Alison, who had turned away again to rummage in a cupboard while Barb pulled herself together. "You're right; I should have told you, and I truly didn't intend to hurt your feelings. Please don't be angry."

"It's all right." Alison set a glass of water and a white oval tablet down in front of her. "Here, I want you to take this. We're near enough the same size, it'll be the right dosage – a bit low for you, maybe, but better too little than too much."

"What is it?"

"Alprazolam," said Alison.

"Xanax? No, thank you." Barb pinched the tablet up with two fingers and put it firmly down on the other side of the table with a tiny click. "You know as well as I do how addictive that stuff is. How did you even get it? It's not allowable on the NHS."

"Never mind how I got it," Alison said, pushing the tablet back to her again. "Just take it. You've had a hell of a time these last few days; you're upset and you need to rest."

"I don't want it," Barb said stubbornly.

Alison rolled her eyes. "God, you psychologists are all alike. It's perfectly fine to drug other people until they don't know their names, but just try to catch you taking some of your own medicine."

"That isn't fair and you know it," Barb said, and pushed the tablet away one more time. "And for your information, I do take meds when I need them, but I don't need this. I haven't got an anxiety disorder. I've got – well, I haven't decided yet what I've got, but it isn't that." A sudden terrible idea occurred to her. "You aren't thinking of filling me with tranquilisers to put me to sleep and then going back to my house on your own, are you? Because if you are, I won't let you do it. I'll _sit_ on you if I have to. If you're right about Paul, I might have a bit of protection, but you haven't. It would be suicide."

"I know," Alison said. "That's why I don't mean to do it. I've got to keep on living, whether I want to or not. I promised I would." She smiled faintly. "It would have been the least subtle Mickey Finn ever, don't you think, if I just handed it to you to swallow?"

"It would have been perfect," Barb said, "because I couldn't have accused you of forcing it on me after. Which sort of rapist do you think has the best defence if he's caught - the sort who chloroforms women in alleys, or the sort who buys them lots of drinks and offers them a ride home at closing time?"

"Blimey, Barbara, you've got a bit of a criminal mind, haven't you?"

"So would you have, if you'd spent twenty-five years writing about them," Barb said. She looked at her watch, which had somehow survived the sub-zero temperatures and was still loyally keeping time for her. "Look, I appreciate the offer, but I really don't want to take anything. I'm knackered and I'm sure I'll be able to sleep without any help. Let's just go to bed, and maybe in the morning, one of us will have had a brilliant idea about what to do next."

"All right," Alison said. "I'll fetch your blankets, shall I?"

Barb fully expected to close her eyes as soon as she lay down and not open them again until morning. Instead, three hours later, she was wide awake and wondering whether she ought to have taken Alison up on the Xanax after all. She had managed to doze off twice, only to wake in a near-panic from terrifying dreams. In one, she and Robert had been searching for something in the loft at her house, sifting through old crates and boxes, until they had found Alison's frozen corpse packed in a steamer trunk full of snow. In the other, she had seen the drifting shape of John Collier's spirit and had run at it and bashed it with both fists, screaming for it to go away and leave her alone. She'd beaten it down onto the floor and was tearing it into shreds when she realised that it was really Paul, and she had killed him. After that, she'd been afraid to go to sleep again. She understood what was happening - her subconscious was working desperately to sort out everything her conscious mind had witnessed - but it didn't make her enjoy the process any more.

Now she lay muffled in blankets, watching the hands of Alison's illuminated table clock crawl toward two and twelve, and hurting everywhere. Her back ached; her shoulders felt half dislocated from the effort of dragging Alison out into the garden earlier; and the cut on her neck, a minor annoyance when she'd still been numb with cold and shock, had developed a low, constant throb that felt like an extra heartbeat. On top of it all, she was missing Alec, who usually went prowling in the early evening and then came in to sleep curled up beside her, with his forepaws under his chin and his tail tucked neatly over his nose. She couldn't think very long about Alec, alone and frightened in a cold metal cage at the vets, without wanting to cry again. She had already made up her mind to collect him first thing tomorrow, as soon as the surgery opened.

First, though, she had to get through tonight, she thought, and rolled over in search of a more tolerable position. The sofa was at least as old as she was, and all the springs inside it that weren't worn flat were broken, with their sharp ends poking relentlessly into different bits of her. She spared a cross and thoroughly unfair thought for all its previous owners, who had probably shagged like rabbits on it and let their children use it as a climbing frame, without ever thinking that one day a poor displaced person might need to sleep there - a poor displaced person who was tall enough to have to sleep in a semicolon shape to fit.

She squirmed about one more time, looking for that elusive comfortable spot, and then gave in and sat up. An idea had been building in her mind for more than an hour now, an idea that she'd told herself was a last resort, but which seemed more appealing with every passing minute. Leaving her blankets behind, she fumbled her way to the stairs and climbed them, wincing at every unfamiliar creak and squeak. At the top, she felt of both doors, pushed open the one that was slightly ajar, and found Alison's bed by barking her shins on its edge and nearly falling onto it.

"Alison, are you awake?"

"I am now," said Alison's voice out of the dark. "What's the matter?"

"Can I sleep here?"

"Why?"

"Your sofa is pants," Barb said. Then, with some reluctance, she added, "And I'd rather not be on my own. I can't stop thinking about it all -- not just what happened tonight, but everything. I feel the way I did when Paul died, and Robert, as if the whole world's gone wrong. I still don't want the meds, but I'd like some company, if you don't mind."

"Here, then," Alison said, and Barb heard rustling noises as she shifted over to make room. Feeling awkward but grateful, she crept into the bed and pulled Alison's duvet over herself like a cocoon. It was pure heaven underneath, warm and cosy and blissfully soft, and almost at once she felt half her aches and pains melt away.

"Thanks," she said. "Much better than the sofa."

"Glad to hear it," Alison said. "I hope you don't expect me to cuddle up with you, though."

"Why not?" Barb said tartly. "I don't recall you having a problem with it last night."

There was a moment of silence, and then Alison said "Shush. You can't stay if you're going to keep talking."

"I'm not going to keep talking."

"You're still talking," Alison pointed out.

"I'm only talking because you're talking to me," Barb said, exasperated, and rolled over so her back was to Alison. "Stop talking and I'll stop too."

"Psychologists," Alison said in a soft, amused voice. "All alike. Every one."


	16. Chapter 16

Alison sat huddled on a park bench under bare, dripping trees, watching a teenage boy throw a ball for an excited retriever. Clouds loomed up on the horizon, black and bloated with more rain, but the park itself was washed in golden early-morning sunlight.

_Enjoy it while you can_, she thought, as the boy threw the ball again. The dog bounded after it, skidded on the grass, and galloped back with its fringed yellow tail flying like a pennant. Laughing, the boy tugged the ball out of its mouth and gave its ears a rough, affectionate tousle before the next throw.

Alison felt a smile forming at their antics, but suppressed it quickly as the thin scabs of last night's scratches pulled and threatened to split. It hadn't been fun, walking here looking like the fucking Phantom of the Opera. The few people she'd passed on the street had stared at her in a way she remembered all too well from the last year of her marriage, when she'd sometimes had to go out with bruises that makeup and sunglasses wouldn't hide. Just as they'd been back then, some of the looks had been curious, some sympathetic, and some disapproving, as if the observer thought she must have got what she deserved. She'd thought of shouting out that a dead man had done this to her – if they wanted to stare, she'd really give them something to stare at – but had decided she couldn't be bothered. She had other things to worry about.

"Go, go, go!" the boy called to the dog as he sent the ball soaring in another long, high arc.

Alison followed the tiny red dot's rise and fall against the sky and thought about Barbara's brother, who'd been only two or three years older than that boy when his life was snuffed out. Paul, who had loved his sister; who had seen her in peril and come to her defence. Paul, who might be the only thing now standing between both of them and a furious spirit. She hadn't felt Paul in Barbara's house at all, but then it had been hard to feel much with John Collier's loathsome presence filling up everything, even down to the spaces between molecules, it seemed.

Her lip curled with revulsion at that memory. Collier's interest in Barbara had a dreadful intimacy to it, not quite sexual, but possessive in a way that made her stomach twist and her flesh creep. She hadn't told Barbara about that bit of it, and it was just as well she hadn't. Poor Barbara was already traumatised enough; she'd spent half the night flailing about with bad dreams, defying all Alison's efforts to quiet her, and had only fallen into a deeper sleep an hour or two before dawn. She'd still been dead to the world, looking as pale and sombre as a Renaissance Virgin in a painting, when Alison had given up on getting any sleep of her own and decided to go for a walk to clear her head. As soon as she'd got out of bed, the long slash on her lower back had started to throb, and she'd gone downstairs and stood in the kitchen for a long time, holding the bottle of oxycodone in her hand, before putting it back and taking three Nurofen instead. There was no point in replacing one addiction with another.

Pushing that thought away, she fumbled in her pocket and pulled out Barbara's mobile, impossibly tiny and feather-light in its blue brushed-metal casing. She hadn't borrowed it with permission, exactly, but Barbara had been willing enough to let her use it the night before, and she didn't plan to do anything with it but try to reach Helen again. She was getting truly frightened about Helen's failure to answer the phone. If something had happened to her - but no, it couldn't have, or Helen would have come to say goodbye. God knew having a physical form had never stopped her from swanning around wherever she pleased; Vi had told her off regularly for spirit travelling, which she had said was dangerous and shouldn't be meddled with, and did Helen want to give Alison ideas? Helen had rolled her eyes, but had told Alison privately not to try leaving her body: it was all very well when it worked, but when things went wrong, the consequences could be fatal. Years later, Alison had woken in a hospital bed in Bristol, weak and atrophied from twenty-seven days of unconsciousness, and realised just how right Helen had been.

_I'd be insane to go there again_, she thought. _Not just confused or delusional; really barking mad, even worse than they all said I was._

But insane or not, she was considering it. The idea had come to her sometime in the middle of the night, as rain drummed on the bedroom window and Barbara tossed and turned and made restless, unhappy noises beside her. She hadn't been able to see Paul when she was in the flesh, for reasons she still didn't understand, but perhaps if she went to Barbara's house in spirit, she could reach him; talk to him; find out how they could help each other. On the other hand, she might very well lose herself in the attempt, and then Barbara would be alone, with no one on this side of life who understood the danger she was in. She didn't want to abandon Barbara that way, not when they were just finding their footing as friends.

She rang Helen's number for what felt like the thousandth time, and chewed fiercely at a cuticle as she waited. It had felt so good, these last days, to have something like friendship in her life again, even if it was a friendship born out of shared horror. The last time she'd had anything close had been just after Robert had died, when she'd had a series of lunches with his wife, that fine-boned, nervy girl who'd been half adversary, half ally during the terrible final hours of his life. Jude had been eager to talk to anyone who had known Robert, and especially, she'd confided over an untouched plate of food, to someone who was willing to entertain the possibility that Robert still existed somehow, somewhere. Alison had enjoyed the interaction, but she'd known she was only filling a short-term need that would diminish as Jude began to get on with things, and when Jude's invitations had slowed and then stopped, she hadn't been surprised. Since then, she'd been completely on her own except for Helen, who was too far away for more than a weekly phone call.

"And who doesn't answer her fucking phone anyway," she muttered, and bit down on her cuticle so hard that the familiar coppery tang of blood filled her mouth. "Oh shit. Oh Helen, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. Just answer, please. I need you."

The buzzing went on and on and on, and at last Alison gave up and tucked Barbara's mobile back into her pocket. She hadn't even taken her hand away when she felt a vibration under her fingers, and pulled it out again to see its screen lit up and displaying her own number. No need to wonder whom that might be, she thought as she flipped it open.

"Alison?" Barbara's voice was scratchy with sleep, and Alison imagined her sitting on the edge of the bed, where the telephone was, with her hair all mussed and her eyes still half-open. The image made her smile.

"Yeah, it's me."

"Why have you got my phone?"

"I went for a walk and borrowed it," Alison said. "I didn't want to wake you to ask, not after the night you had. How are you feeling?"

"Terrible," said Barbara. "How are you?"

"I've been worse," said Alison. Her free hand automatically pressed against her abdomen, covering the scars. "It doesn't matter, though. Listen, I meant to tell you, I've had an idea."

"What sort of idea?"

"It'll be easier to explain in person," Alison said. She looked round and saw that the boy and his dog had gone, leaving the wet, yellowing autumn grass all trampled and muddy. The park was deserted except for her and an old man, standing beneath one of the leafless trees and staring at her with the odd, blankly expectant look she associated with spirits. In fact, she realised as she inspected him more closely, he _was_ a spirit, and clearly aware that she could see him.

_Oh no, not now_, she thought. _Go away, just go AWAY._ She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, he was right in front of her, near enough to touch, waiting to be acknowledged.

"Alison?" Barbara sounded a little panicked. "Alison, where are you? Are you coming home, or should I meet you somewhere?"

Alison's eyes were locked on the old man's spirit. He must have died of cancer, she thought; his skin was a greyish, unhealthy colour, and his body was emaciated under its baggy brown trousers and blue cardigan. His wrinkled mouth moved as if in silent speech, but nothing came out.

"Alison!"

"It's okay," she said abruptly. "It's fine. I think – I think you'd better come to me, though. I walked here, but I could use a lift home. I'm tired." She gave Barbara a brief series of directions. "Come soon, all right?"

"Why? Is something the matter?"

"Just come soon," Alison said.

She put the phone away again and sat looking down at her lap for a moment. On any other day, she would have spoken to the old man, asked if he remembered his name, tried to help him find some peace. Today she couldn't. She was weary and aching and frightened for Helen and Barbara and herself; she had nothing to give to anyone else.

_My son_, the old man said, finding his voice at last. _My son – I need to tell him – to tell him –_

"I don't know your son," Alison said softly. "I'm sorry. I can't help you."

_My son –_

"I can't," Alison said again, and turned her back on him, pulling the hood of her coat up to block him out. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but I just can't. Please leave me alone."

Even without looking, she could feel him still behind her, waiting mute and patient for her to yield, to listen, to help. He could wait forever. He had nothing but time. Stubbornly, she drew her feet up onto the bench, knees against her chest, and wrapped her arms round herself, ignoring the protest from her back. Above her head, the heavy dark clouds rolled closer, threatening to put an end to the brief respite of sunlight. She hoped Barbara had taken her request to heart.


	17. Chapter 17

_My son – I need to find him – to tell him –_

The old man's voice was low but persistent, like the whisper of snow against a window. Alison buried her face against her knees and let her hood fall even further forward, until she could no longer see anything but blackness or hear anything but the thick, hot rush of her blood in her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut and focused her thoughts on other things, on the words of songs and skipping rhymes and prayers she'd learnt as a child, and bit by bit, the voice faded away. She had nearly lulled herself into a waking trance when a hand touched her shoulder, and without thinking, she screamed and hit out at it.

"Alison, don't, it's only me!"

She uncoiled herself and opened her eyes to discover Barbara, bundled up in her black wool coat, her hair pulled back haphazardly and her cheeks pink with cold and exertion. A grey knitted scarf, which Alison recognised as having come from the coat rack at home, hid the bandage on her neck. Except for the angry, puffed-up scratch above her eye, she looked almost her ordinary self, making Alison even more conscious of her own mangled face.

"What's the matter?" Barbara knelt beside the bench, heedless of the soaking ground. "You sounded so strange on the phone. Did something happen?"

Alison licked her lips. "Do you see anyone else in the park?"

"No," said Barbara, bewildered. "There's no one here but the two of us." She took hold of Alison's forearm with both hands, but for once, Alison felt no impulse to pull back; instead of an invasion, the touch was a welcome connection to the physical world, keeping her anchored in reality when her mind wanted to slip away. Her eyelids fluttered, trying to close again, but she forced them open.

"Alison, you're scaring me, stop it ..."

"No one? Not an older man?"

"No one at all." Barbara's grip tightened in sudden panic. "Oh God, is it something to do with _him_?"

"No, it isn't," said Alison, knowing without having to be told which _he_ Barbara meant. She risked a glance over her shoulder, and seeing that the old man's spirit had gone, relaxed a bit. "It's nothing. Thanks for coming; I don't think I could have made it all the way back. Sometimes I start walking and forget to stop."

Barbara's expressive dark eyebrows were still drawn together in worry, but she let go Alison's arm and stood up. "Well, I'm afraid you'll have to walk a little more. I parked near the shops."

"Oh good," Alison said, and managed a shaky smile. "Looking at shoes always cheers me up."

---

At this hour, most people were still sleeping, and the road leading away from the park was empty except for a few early cyclists and joggers, and the occasional car that made a sizzling noise on the wet tarmac as it passed. They walked slowly, passing clothing shops and cafés and a Pizza Express, and for a few minutes Barb felt almost normal; just out for a Sunday morning stroll that would end with coffee and _pain au chocolat_ and a long, leisurely perusal of the papers. A stray drop of rain splashed on her coat sleeve, leaving a tiny starburst-shaped wet mark, but no others followed it: the clouds were biding their time. So, apparently, was Alison, who hadn't said a word since they left the park, and seemed to be concentrating mainly on putting one foot in front of the other. Her whole body radiated exhaustion; even her fair hair looked dull and ashen.

"You said you'd had an idea," Barb prompted at last.

"Hmm?" Alison glanced over at her as if surprised to see that she was still there. "Oh. Right." She paused. "Do you know what spirit travelling is?"

Barb nodded. "Astral projection. People think they can detach their consciousness from their bodies and travel to other places." The corners of her mouth twitched upward involuntarily. "I tried that once at uni, only there it was called an acid trip."

Alison snorted and rubbed her bare hands together for warmth, then tucked them up under her arms, shivering. "And? Did you travel to other places?"

"Not quite," Barb said. "I thought the cushions on the sofa had teeth and could bite me, and when I turned round to tell Neil about it, I threw up in his lap."

"Lovely," said Alison. "Well, I mean the real sort of spirit travelling – it is real, you know. Almost anyone can do it if they try, but you shouldn't because it's dangerous."

"Dangerous how?" Barb asked, wondering what Alison was getting at. She had an unpleasant feeling that she already knew, but perhaps she was wrong. She'd certainly had enough practice at being wrong lately; if she'd had time to reflect, she expected her ego would have been quite wounded by it.

"You can lose your way and not be able to find your body again," Alison said. "If that happens, you'll still be alive, but in a vegetative state."

"Or?"

"Or you can see the light and be tempted to go into it, to cross over," Alison said.

"And if you do that?"

"Then you die," Alison said.

Barb stopped cold in front of a shop window full of copper pans and brioche moulds and orange-enamelled Le Crueset casseroles, so abruptly that Alison bumped into her. "Don't play games with me, Alison. You aren't telling me all this just to educate me on the methods of modern mediums, are you? You're telling me because you're planning to try it yourself."

The expression on Alison's face said that she wasn't quite sure what she was or wasn't planning to do, but she nodded. "I've got to communicate with your brother's spirit somehow, to find out what he knows. I couldn't do it in person, but this way –" She broke off as Barb interrupted her.

"No. No, Alison. We went through this last night. I'm not going to let you go back there."

"Oh really?" Alison untucked her hands and planted them on her hips. "I'm planning to go in spirit, not on the number nine bus. I'd like to see you work out a way to stop me."

"It isn't _funny_," Barb said fiercely. "I'm frightened for you." She thought of Robert's voice on the other end of her phone after Irene Moser's séance, hoarse and scared and vulnerable, telling her that Alison had collapsed and begging her to come to the hospital and wait with him. She'd gone, of course, not because she'd cared about Alison then, but because Robert had needed her. How many idiotic things had she done in her life because she wanted to feel as if someone needed her?

"I don't think it's funny either," Alison said. "I don't want to do it. I said I'd made a promise to go on living, and I meant it. But I've got to communicate with your brother somehow, Barbara, and I don't know how else to do it. I can't just ring him up to chat."

Alison's eyes were so intense, so serious in the frame of her weary, wounded face, that Barb got a queer fluttery feeling in her stomach and had to look away, into the window display. She wished fervently that the shop were open so she could go in and buy things she didn't need and be ordinary for a bit. But it wasn't, and she couldn't, so she studied the cookware and felt miserable instead. Something was worrying at the back of her mind, like a mouse nibbling on a wire – something about the phone, something that had happened not very long ago – and then suddenly she had it.

"Maybe you can ring him up," she said.

"What? How?"

Before Barb could answer, the rain started again, coming down in big wet spatters as if it meant business. She pulled Alison nearer to the shop front, away from the worst of the drips, and briefly explained what had happened when she phoned her house on Friday afternoon. "I was nearly deaf in that ear afterward, it bloody well hurt, and just after that was when I heard Paul, telling me not to go home without you. And then when I was getting ready to go anyway, the radio in my car started playing up, just like the one at home did last night. I know that one of the things ghosts are meant to be able to do is control electronic devices, so --"

She stopped for a moment, reluctant to put forth what she was thinking as a genuine possibility. She was already standing at the edge of the cliff of rationality, and this felt like the step that would send her over the edge forever, plummeting down until she ended up selling crystals on the Internet or reading palms at a funfair.

"EVP," she blurted before she could overthink it any further. "Electronic voice phenomena. Robert wrote a paper on it once, to present at a conference, and he made me watch some ridiculous videos with him for research." It didn't seem so long ago, but it had been years since the two of them had sat on the floor of her lounge, drinking their way down a bottle of whiskey and watching a crew of ghost hunters messing about with microphones and recorders. They'd argued a little – good-natured arguing, not like the bitter quarrels they'd had later – and finally agreed that the eerie voices on the tapes were nothing more than white noise, given meaning by human suggestibility. But God, if they hadn't been ...

"I think I see," Alison said. "You mean, if we ring your number and talk to Paul on the answerphone –"

"Then he might be able to respond that way," Barb said. "And we could play the recording back after and listen."

Alison chewed at a fingernail, thinking, while rain poured off the sides of the shop's striped awning like a waterfall.

"It could work," she said. "But if it doesn't, Barbara, we're going to have to try my way, and soon. You know why, don't you?"

"No," said Barb, who hadn't got a clue. "Why?"

"Because the area Paul can reach is getting smaller," Alison said. "Think about what you've just told me. Three days ago, he could mess about with the car radio and make you hear his voice miles away. By last night, he could only affect the radio inside your house, and you couldn't hear him at all. That isn't good. It could mean he's getting weaker – or Collier's getting stronger, taking more of his energy to contain."

"Oh God." Barb swallowed hard, thinking of Paul struggling alone against that malign force. "But the answerphone is inside the house. He still has some influence there – at least I hope he has –"

"Yeah, he has," Alison said. "If he hadn't, you'd have woken up in bed with Collier this morning. Sorry," she added, seeing Barb recoil, "but it's true."

"I know," Barb said wretchedly. "All right. We'll try this, and if it doesn't work, then you can try your out-of-body experience, and I'll watch over you every second."

"You might not need to, if it does work," Alison said. "It's a good idea. Very scientific."

"Well," said Barb, feeling a warm flush blossom in her cheeks, "what did you expect from a scientist?"

Alison grinned tiredly. "All right, Madame Curie, how are we going to get the recording after we've made it? We can't go to your house and take the answerphone away with us."

"Getting the recording's not a problem," Barb said. "Getting a proper enhanced version of it might take some doing. I've got a plan, though." She looked at her watch. "It's barely nine o'clock. You must have gone out for your marathon walk in the dark."

"It wasn't dark," said Alison with a shifty expression. "Quite."

"Well, I'm dying for a coffee," Barb said, "so let's try to find one, and then I need to make a phone call. And you need to sit down; you've gone all white. That cut on your back hasn't been bleeding again, has it?"

"I don't think so," Alison said, "but you won't catch me going for coffee like this. I've been gawped at enough already today. I'll wait in the car."

---

Some time later, Barb put a pair of steaming espressos down on a convenient table and flipped open her phone, hunting for Neil's number. As it rang, she peered through Starbucks' front window at her car, just outside, and at Alison, who appeared to have fallen off to sleep in the passenger seat.

_God, I wish I were asleep too_, she thought, counting the rings and wondering whether Neil was home, or whether Caroline had made him go to church with her and the kids. She'd often been amused by the idea of Neil, cheerful atheist that he was, sitting through the liturgy while singing Beatles songs in his head, which was what he always did when bored. She wondered if Caroline knew about that habit and decided that she must.

"Hello?" Neil's voice said over the rush of running water.

"It's me," Barb said, thinking it was rather marvellous that after fifteen years apart, she could still say those words and expect Neil to know whom she meant.

"Good grief, Barb, twice in two days? I'm afraid all this attention will go to my head."

"Neil ..."

"Only joking, sweetheart. What's the matter? Are you still in town?"

"No, I'm back in Bristol, but I need another favour, if you don't mind. It's something you can do at a distance."

"I'm listening," Neil said. The water in the background shut off.

"Is there someone in your department who can record a message off my answerphone? I don't mean just holding a recorder up to the receiver, I could do that myself. I mean a proper, high-quality recording, all cleaned up and enhanced, that I can play back through my computer."

There was a pause, and Barb imagined Neil standing in his kitchen, looking through the French doors at a garden full of children's toys and bicycles and rabbit hutches. The twins had had a Wendy house out there, she remembered; they'd dragged her by the hands to see it during a visit years ago. They would be much too old for it now. How had the time passed so quickly?

"Well, yes," Neil said at last. "I know someone who'll know how, but why go to so much trouble? It isn't as if you haven't got an entire university of your own at your disposal."

"I know," Barb said. "It – it isn't something I want people to know about. Please, Neil. You said you'd help with anything I needed, and I need you just to do this and not ask questions. I'll tell you what it's all about later, if I can. All right?"

"All right," Neil said. "How soon do you need this recording?"

"That's the thing," said Barb, "the message isn't quite there yet. But it will be soon, and when it is, I need it captured as quickly as possible. I know it's Sunday, but ..."

"Never mind that. Just tell me when you're ready and I'll do all I can."

"Thanks," said Barb with a rush of relief. She hadn't expected Neil would say no, but she'd been braced to answer many more questions before he said yes, and even to lie if necessary. She hadn't wanted to do either, and she felt a sudden weepy gratitude toward him for not forcing her to.

"It's no trouble," Neil said. He stopped, as if wondering whether he should say anything else, and then seemed to decide in favour of it.

"Are you looking after yourself, Barbara?"

"Absolutely," Barb said without hesitation.

_Oh well, _she thought, _I suppose one lie isn't so bad._

---

TBC_  
_


	18. Chapter 18

Fuelled by caffeine and determination, Barb drove back to Alison's house, where she spent an anxious ten minutes pacing about in the kitchen, waiting for Alison to finish making some sort of mysterious preparations for their telephone call. Now that she was beginning to believe Paul's voice had been real, she felt nearly sick with nerves and anticipation at the prospect of hearing it again, even on a recording_. _Questions she might ask him kept coming into her head: _Did it hurt when you died? _and _Where did you go afterward? _and, most painful of all, _Do you know how much I loved you?_ At last, unwilling to be alone with these thoughts any longer, she went upstairs and found Alison heaping an assortment of odd cushions on the bedroom floor – beaded, wine-coloured velvet; lopsided black brocade with tassels; worn, bottle-green satin covered in water spots – and muttering something under her breath. She caught sight of Barb outside the open door and beckoned her in.

"Have a seat."

"On the floor?"

"It's good for your back."

There didn't seem to be much of an argument against that, so Barb sat down on the green cushion, feeling self-conscious and a bit silly, as if she and Alison were a pair of teenaged girls playing at having a séance. She wrapped her arms round herself – the room was warm to the stifling point, but she needed the comfort of someone's touch, even if it was her own – and watched as Alison struck a match and one by one, lit the row of candles atop the chest of drawers. Each made a faint sputtering sound as it caught and flared, casting a long, trembling shadow up the wall. The clock's hands had barely reached mid-morning, but with the drawn curtains and the candlelight, Barb thought, it might as well have been midnight.

"Do we need the candles?" she asked.

"No, but I like them." Alison shook out the match's tiny flame and dropped the burnt end into a glass bowl full of coins and drawing pins and broken bits of jewellery. "Don't you?"

"I suppose," Barb said. She felt a sudden dull pain and realised that one hand had crept up, unbidden, to the wound on her neck again. It didn't seem possible for such a relatively small injury to hurt so much. Perhaps it was poisoned, she thought; perhaps John Collier had infused it with his hatred, like a bloated black spider's venom that would spread through her body until it stopped her heart … and then his spirit would find hers and ...

"Don't," Alison said, turning from the candles and catching her. "Let it alone to heal. Hold this instead." She scooped the telephone up and deposited it in Barb's lap with a muffled jingle, then lowered herself onto the cushion beside her.

"Have you thought what you're going to say?" she asked, indicating the phone.

"Oh," Barb said with a sinking feeling. "I hoped you might –"

Alison shook her head. "It's your idea."

"But you're the one who does this sort of thing," Barb insisted. "You know the right words to use."

"It doesn't matter," Alison said. "You're Paul's sister, Barbara. You're the one he loves; the one he's come to protect. It's your voice he'll want to hear. Not mine."

Barb looked down at the phone. It was very like the one that had sat on a table in the lounge when she and Paul and Stephen were children: hard black Bakelite with a long, curling cord and a yellowed number card in the centre of its rotary dial. On the day Paul died, she'd heard the call come in and gone tearing downstairs, hoping it was for her, but there'd been a grim, unfamiliar man's voice on the line instead, asking to speak to her mother. It had been years after that before she'd been able to feel anything but dread at the sound of a ringing phone. The idea that she was about to communicate with Paul's spirit through one seemed both utterly mad and somehow right, as if her entire life were coming full circle.

"Ready now?" Alison asked.

"Yes," Barb said. She reached for the receiver, but stopped halfway there. "No, wait. What about Collier? When we were inside the house, you said I shouldn't speak, that it made him stronger. If Paul hears me now, so will he. Suppose it makes him strong enough to hurt Paul, or to break away somehow?"

"I don't think it will," Alison said. "He can hear your voice, but he can't get at you to to use your life-force, not from that distance. But just to be safe, mind what you say, and don't mention his name. He loves that."

"He isn't going to get it," Barb said. She jabbed her finger into the hole for the first number - there was that queer sensation again, the feeling of time doubling back on itself - and started to dial.

For a long moment, the only sound was the tick of the clock and the click-whirr of the telephone dial going round, followed by her own voice, bright and cheerful, inviting callers to leave a message if they liked. Just before the outgoing announcement ended, she remembered Friday's violent blast of static, hastily withdrew the receiver to a safe distance and waited for the tone to finish. When nothing happened, she put the receiver back to her ear and drew a deep breath.

"Paul," she said, and then had to stop, biting her lip to hold in the noisy, childish tears that wanted to burst out. Alison touched her arm in gentle support, and she gulped down a sob and tried again.

"Paul, I – I know you're there. I want to help you. How can I help you?"

Silence. She tried to will a connection between them, to picture Paul in her mind: Paul as he had looked the last time she'd seen him, standing on the pavement with his rucksack slung over one shoulder and his dark hair chopped off and spiked like Johnny Rotten's, giving her a crooked grin and a rough hug and telling her to behave herself whilst he was away. The old loneliness for him was a cold, heavy ache in her chest, as if she'd swallowed a stone that had caught halfway down.

"Please," she said. "Please talk to me. Tell me what I can do, and I'll do it. I'll do anything for you, Paul. You don't have to fight alone –" She faltered on the last word, realising she was getting too close to the subject of Collier, and cast about for something else to say.

"Just tell me what you need," she finished lamely, and thrust the phone at Alison, feeling as if she'd failed somehow. She wasn't certain what she'd thought would happen, but that hadn't been it. Alison put the receiver to her own ear and listened for a minute or two with a grave expression, then returned it to its place.

"I know," Barb said at once. "I should have said more. I just –"

"You were fine," Alison said. "Well done. Now we've just got to find out what Paul had to say." She looked Barb up and down, taking in her flushed face and clenched, white-knuckled hands. "We don't have to do it right away, though. You look as if you need a break. And a drink."

It was a tempting suggestion, but with regret, Barb declined it. "I want to keep going - I've got to, or I'll lose my nerve. But I'll have that drink, if you don't mind."

Alison went away to fetch it, and Barb found her own phone and called Neil, who answered on the first ring, as if he'd been waiting for her. This time, the background noise was the racket of kids fighting over whose turn it was to have a go on the Wii, and their mother telling them that if they kept on, she was going to chuck the Wii through a window. The contrast between the sounds of busy family life and the cold silence at her house was enough to bring the tears back to Barb's eyes, but she managed to keep them out of her voice as she told Neil that she was ready for his colleague to make the recording. Just as she disconnected the call, Alison reappeared, with a brimming glass of wine in one hand and a bottle of fizzy water in the other.

"Thanks," said Barb, accepting the glass and raising an eyebrow at the smooth taste; it wasn't at all the sort of cheap plonk she'd been expecting, given Alison's otherwise frugal habits. "So now we wait."

"Now we wait," Alison agreed.

They waited while Barb nursed her glass of wine, Alison rearranged her collection of vintage dresses and shoes, and three of the candles atop the chest of drawers burnt low and drowned in their own wax. Alison asked a few more questions about Barb's family - were her parents still alive? What sort of work had they done? How many siblings had she in all? - and Barb answered willingly enough that her father had been a civil servant and her mother a teacher; that her father had died just before she finished her PhD; and that she had a younger brother, who was the parent of her grown-up niece and teenage nephew. Talking about her real life had a soothing effect (which, she suspected, had been Alison's intention), and by the time her mobile finally rang, she was able to answer it quite calmly.

"Are you Barbara?" It was a girl's voice, fresh and strong and full of bursting confidence, and it made Barb feel old right down to her bones. She wondered how Neil, who was nearly five years her senior, felt about working with this bright spark of youth. Even twenty-one-year-old Robert, coming to her with his newly minted undergraduate degree, had seemed more like her contemporary than someone who could have been her child ... but she had been younger then too ...

"Yes," she said, realising that the voice's owner was waiting for Granny Sinyard to get her head together and answer. "And you are?"

"Lydia Crandall," the girl said. "I'm one of Professor Allingham's research students. I've got the file you wanted – rang your number through Skype and recorded the message directly onto my hard drive. I've optimised it as much as I can, and it's waiting on our FTP site for you to download. Is there an email address I can send the link to?"

Barb spelt it out for her. "What shall I do when I get there?"

"Drag the file to your desktop to copy it, double-click to open. Easy peasy." Lydia hesitated, and some of the brash tone disappeared. "It's an awfully strange recording, you know. Can I ask -"

"No, I'm afraid you can't," Barb said, wincing with embarrassment at the rudeness, but seeing no other way to end this conversation quickly and completely. "Thank you, Lydia. It was very good of you to take the time out of your weekend, and I'll be sure to tell Professor Allingham what a help you've been."

"It wasn't any trouble really," Lydia said. "Actually, I quite enjoyed it. It was like solving a puzzle - some of the voices were at much higher frequencies than others, and ..."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Barb. "I'll let you go in a moment, but I have one more favour to ask - please don't discuss what's in the file, or share it with anyone. Not even with Professor Allingham. Can you do that for me?"

"Of course," said Lydia, as if being asked to make confidential recordings were an everyday event for her. "Bye, then."

"Bye," Barb said, already flipping open the lid of her laptop and hunting for a connection. One of Alison's neighbours had an open network, and in a moment she had logged in to her email, clicked Lydia's link, and started copying the file. Alison, who had abandoned her wardrobe project and come to sit on the cushions again when the phone rang, leant in close to see what was happening.

"Have you got it?"

"Almost," Barb said, watching animated pages flying from one folder to another. "It isn't a very big file. There." She turned the laptop's volume up as loud as it would go, then double-clicked the file icon. The recording began with a second or two of blank space, followed by an electronic bleep, and then by Barb's recorded voice.

"_Paul, I – I know you're there."_

"_I'm here."__  
_

"Oh dear God!" Barb made a panicky grab for Alison, forgetting Alison's dislike of sudden uninvited contact, and got hold of her round the shoulders. "Alison, did you hear that? Please tell me you heard that."

"I heard it," Alison said. "Sshhh. Go back a bit, we may have missed something."

"_Paul, I – I know you're there."_

"_I'm here." _The voice was whispery and faint, but there was no mistaking it. It wasn't an imagined conversation in her head, or something spun from white noise and wishful thinking. It was real. She had spoken to Paul and he had answered her._  
_

"_I want to help you. How can I help you?"_

"_Help you. Help me, Barbara Anne."_

"_Please. Please talk to me. Tell me what I can do, and I'll do it. I'll do anything for you, Paul. You don't have to fight alone -" _

"_Help me. Go home."  
_

"_Just tell me what you need."_

"_Go home and get it. Go home. Go home."_

A clattering noise came next –- the sound of Barb handing the receiver over to Alison -– and then Paul spoke again, almost inaudible now.

"_Get it. Go home."_

"_Let me go." _A second voice broke in above the first: stronger, deeper, angrier. Barb felt the reaction to it run through Alison's whole body like a tremor, and only half realising what it meant, instinctively clutched Alison even closer. Her grip was so tight that she was afraid it must hurt, but she couldn't stop, and Alison, transfixed and listening, seemed not to notice.

"_Let me go."_ Second voice.

"_Help me." _Paul.

"_Let me go." _Second voice._  
_

"_Help me. Barbara Anne_," Paul whispered._ "Go home. Go home. Go home." _


	19. Chapter 19

After the recording ended, they sat in shocked, frozen silence for a few minutes. Rain tapped sharply at the window, like someone with skeletal fingers asking to be let in. The laptop's screen dimmed and then went into sleep mode. At last, Barbara spoke.

"That was _him, _wasn't it? That's what he sounds like."

"Yes," Alison said.

"He's evil," Barbara said. Her voice quivered as if she were about to cry, but when Alison twisted round in her arms to look, there were no tears: her eyes were wide and scared and very dark, with pupils dilated almost far enough to swallow up the irises, but they were dry. "I thought he was psychotic, and he probably is that too, but –" She shuddered and let Alison go. "You were right. It's both. It's madness and evil, and I can't tell where one leaves off and the other begins."

"I know," Alison said. "But don't think about that just now. Think about Paul instead. He's on the opposite side; he's fighting for good, and he needs you to help him. What did he mean when he told you to go home?"

"I've no idea," Barbara said. "He couldn't have meant for me to go home to my house; all he's done so far has been to try to warn me away from there. And as for getting something –" She made a helpless palms-up gesture. "I have a few books and vinyl records that belonged to him, and I think my brother Stephen has the watch he got for his eighteenth birthday, but everything else has been gone for years and years. Our parents gave all his clothes and things away because they couldn't bear to look at them. And even if I could get them, I don't see what good they could possibly do."

"We'll work that bit out later," Alison said. "Where else is home?"

"Erm, the only other place would be the house we grew up in. That would be home to Paul; he never lived anywhere else, except for the few months he was away at uni."

"Who owns that house now?"

"My mother does," said Barbara. "She lives in it. We've tried to get her to move into a smaller place, Stephen and I, but she won't hear of it."

"I reckon stubbornness runs in the family," said Alison with a wry smile. "All right. Is anything still there, in that house, that would have been special to you or to Paul, or to both of you? He obviously thought you would know."

Barbara shook her head, at a loss. "As I said, all of Paul's things are long gone, and I doubt there's anything of mine there either, unless my mum has my roller skates or my Sindy doll stuffed up in the loft. And don't forget, Paul was the eldest by six years; we didn't begin to have a more equal relationship until near the end of his life, when we were both teenagers. What I mean is, I told him my secrets, but he didn't often tell me his. If he had some sort of a – a talisman, I didn't know about it. I swear."

The look on her face was so genuinely baffled that Alison concluded she was telling the truth. Frustrated, she stretched out amongst the cushions on the floor and lay flat on her back, hands over her face, trying to think. For at least the hundredth time in the past few days, she wished she could talk to Helen, or to her Aunty Vi, either of whom would have known what other questions to ask to tease out the right answer. Although if she had to try spirit travelling after all, she thought, she might be seeing Vi sooner rather than later. Drained and injured as she was, how much chance would she have of making the journey safely?

It was an upsetting prospect, but she had forgotten that Barbara was blessed with both an agile mind and an obstinate refusal to give up on a problem. Barbara had kept mulling over the question while Alison was lost in worry, and now she presented a possible solution.

"There's the summerhouse," she said, "but that's a place, not a thing I can fetch."

Alison parted her fingers just enough to look up at Barbara through them.

"What summerhouse?"

"The summerhouse in our garden," Barbara said. "That was something important to both of us."

"It was?" Alison asked, sitting up again. On her bedside table, she caught sight of Barbara's discarded glass, with a mouthful or two of wine still left at the bottom, and felt a wave of craving so overwhelming it frightened her. She deliberately averted her gaze and focused on Barbara's face, marred by fatigue and dark, puffy circles under the eyes, but still possessing the sort of ageless bone structure that made artists weep.

"Tell me about it," she said.

"Well, it was built around the same time as the main house, but the previous owners had let it go to rack and ruin, and it was just an eyesore really. My dad was always saying he was going to pull it down, but he never did, so it became a dumping ground for boxes and tools and broken things, not to mention a sanctuary for mice." She grimaced. "No one wanted anything to do with it, so when Paul was fifteen or sixteen, he cleared out a lot of the old rubbish and turned it into his own private place, where he could go to get away from the rest of the family. For a long time, he wouldn't let anyone else near it, but the last year he was at home, he started inviting me in to visit. We would listen to the radio, or sit and talk, and I was so proud to be grown-up enough to spend time with him that way – not as a little sister who needed looking after, but as a friend ..."

Barbara trailed off, and Alison saw that this was a painful memory as well as a sweet one, full of wistfulness for the relationship that might have been, if they'd only had the chance to know one another as adults. She wasn't sure whether it made her wish she'd had a brother of her own, or feel relieved that she'd never had one to lose.

"Anyway," Barbara went on after a pause, "just before he left to go to uni, he took me and Stephen out into the garden, and he stood us in front of the summerhouse and announced that as I was next eldest – I was thirteen then, almost fourteen, and Stephen was eleven – he was passing it down to me, and if Stephen so much as put a foot over the threshold without my permission, then he, Paul, would personally give him a good smacking next time he was at home. So it became my place, and after Paul was killed a few months later, I spent lots of time there, reading his books and thinking about him, and sometimes talking out loud to him as if he could hear me."

"He did hear you," Alison said.

"Yes," Barbara said, as if realising it for the first time. "I suppose he did, didn't he?"

There was another silence, but not an awkward one. Then Alison said, "So the summerhouse is still there, then?"

Barbara nodded. "When I went to uni myself, Stephen used it for a couple of years, and then he left home too and it slowly became a storage shed again. The last time I looked inside was two or three summers ago, when I was visiting, and it was crammed full of old furniture. Certainly nothing that seemed to have any sentimental value - but it's the only place or thing I can think of that would have meaning both to me and Paul. He never said it in so many words, but I know he enjoyed the time we spent together there, too."

"All right," Alison said, "we've got to go and see what we can find. Where is it?"

"You won't like this," Barbara said, "but it's where we've just come from. We could have got there in five minutes from that damned graveyard. If we'd known ..." She shrugged. "There's no help for it now. We'll have to go back, that's all."

"We ought to leave soon, then."

"Not today," Barbara said firmly. "I know time is short, but my mother's nearly eighty and not in the best of health, and I don't mean to worry her with any of this if I can help it. Her social club meets every Monday and Wednesday morning, so we can go first thing tomorrow, while she's away. They play euchre for money and it goes on for hours; we'll be gone long before she comes home." She stood up. "I shouldn't impose on you for another night, though. I can find someplace else to stay."

"You aren't imposing," Alison said. "Actually, I - I'd like you to stay here. It's nice to have company now and then, and you're a good guest."

Barbara had been looking a bit stiff and haughty, as Alison had realised she often did when she was feeling uncomfortable or unsure of herself. Now she relaxed into a smile, a real, warm one that crinkled the corners of her eyes and transformed her whole face. "Okay. Thanks."

"It's nothing."

"No, it isn't." Barbara said. She brightened with a sudden idea. "Suppose I cook a real dinner for you, as a sort of repayment? I could do that steak you didn't have at the hotel the other night."

"You don't have to."

"But I want to."

Alison bit her lip and then yielded, partly to humour Barbara and partly because she couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten steak - or any sort of protein that wasn't either cheap mince or suspicious chicken parts on the verge of expiring - and the thought made her mouth water. So did the idea of having her daily glass of wine along with it; but that, she thought, was a concern for later.

"That sounds lovely," she said.

"Good," Barbara said, pleased. "I'll go shopping right now."

"Take your time," Alison said. "I've got something to do, and I've got to do it alone."


End file.
